Hey guys,
Had my Toshiba L500 give out on me about a month ago and as it is out of warranty (by around a week when it died), it will cost more than I paid for it in the first place to replace the motherboard, RAM, and CPU etc. It was caused by my mistake of leaving it on on a 47*c day.
I am now in the market for a cheap (under $600) notebook that is quite portable (so a 17" is out of the question as I need to be able to carry it around Uni) and yet has decent specs (eg. 2-4gb RAM 350+ HD etc.). At least 3 hrs battery would be great but not sure if that'll work. I have a few ideas so far but if anyone has any suggestions they would be much appreciated.
So far I'm looking at...

Asus X52N

Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 13

Inspiron 15


I've had (and heard of) bad experiences with Toshiba and Acer so I'm trying to stay away from them.
Its been catch 22 with my old acer (took forever to get running) thats barely holding together so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

I like the multi touch pad on the Asus X52N, but don't like the AMD processor

The inspirion 15 is a nice one, the best of the 3 you posted (my opinion)

Here are som HP laptop's i found (hope you don't mind HP) I think they're that what you're looking for, they're in the price range and have a solid performance:

HP Pavilion dv6t series

HP G42t series

HP G62t series

HP G62x series

Wow thanks Shoby. I've had a HP Compaq that's still going great after 3+ years of steady use (except the battery so HP's are great from what I've seen). Didn't think I could get something like that for that cheap. Looking at the G42t series (the 14") at the moment.
Only thing that might end up to be a problem is getting it in Australia.
Thanks again.

I'm glad I could help.
I don't know abou the shipping issue, but i'm pretty sure that they can deliver to Australia, I was looking here but it doesen't give any info about that.

Well i like Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 13

Yeah, I'm leaning towards the Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 13.
The lightweight and size, specs are decent and Win7 pro looks good. It also had MS Office Home/Student for $50 so best for my position. If the Inspiron was a 13" that'd be my choice (the Inspiron 13" is $100 more and only an AMD) and as for the HP's, HP Australia doesn't stock them and the warranty and charger are American only. I know Lenovo's cases are strong and well it does have a multi-touch pad. I dunno, this is a hard thing to find.

Hey guys,
Ended up getting a bargain on the HP Pavilion DM3 (Core 2 Duo, 13" Screen, 512mb nvidea graphics, 4gb ram and a 320gb 7200rpm HD) for $579. So far it's looking great had some trouble reinstalling windows from 32bit to 64bit but was probably the best seeing as HP deemed it best to bloat the entire PC full of trial ware and useless programs.
Thanks for the help again.

@ jumper918 - When I bought my Acer tower last year I made the recovery discs when I first started using it but I also had the option to make a completely SEPERATE disc for all the drivers for the bloatware. I found this useful because some of the bloatware that came with my tower was ACTUALLY "useful". The seperate disc I made for the bloatware drivers came with checkboxes, so I could "pick and choose" which apps I could install again if I so chose to do so. [The ones I found useful were free video/audio converters] - It was good to have the bloatware disc seperate from the OS recovery discs ....... hope you've made your recovery discs by the way ....!?!
Nice choice of laptop you got there too!

The laptop came with 2 partitions on the machine. One is for HP "tools" and one for normal recovery etc. The tools one had all the bloatware and the drivers on it already which was good too. I made some recovery disks too though just in case. Can't be too safe I guess. I know what you're meaning some of the Toshiba tools were quite useful too.
Thanks. Loving it so far. It's got like a Macbook's keyboard and the brushed aluminium looks great and barely attracts any fingerprints. And battery life is great too - should run out in about 30 minutes which means it lasted a good 6 or so hours. Very happy with the purchase, great price too especially seeing as it came with the external DVD drive which the Lenovo didn't.

Wow! You got and external DVD drive with it too eh?!! Nice!
[$579 Australian is £361.80 by the way ........ Sounds ok to me! ]