Need to replace a laptop

Argenis

I bought a rather expensive laptop at the time 4 years ago. At the time, it cost around €1000. It has a 17" 1440x900 screen, 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 2 250GB 7200rpm HDDs and a Radeon HD 3650.

The laptop itself is on the way out. Battery life is around 50 minutes of MS Word. The plastic around the screen is all falling apart, and the screen itself is clearly at an angle when the laptop is closed which makes me worry the hinge might come apart. It heats up under even moderate use. In short, despite performing adequately, its in need of replacement. My budget is €600.

My problem is that when I shop around, for €600, most laptops I find have:

Roughly equivalent processors. Today's cheap end is pretty much where the better midrange stuff was when I bought the laptop.
4GB RAM - Exactly the same as my laptop. I would have thought tech would have moved up. Furthermore, unlike my years old laptop, most of these are not upgradeable to 8GB RAM (ok, DDR2 RAM costs a fortune so I wouldn't have updated my current laptop either, but..)
Slower, sometimes also smaller, hard drives.
Intel Graphics Cards - I'm sure the Geforce 520M can beat my laptops card, but I've only seen one laptop in the price range with it.
1366x768 maximum screen resolution - Not so much worried about the picture quality aspect, more about how much stuff I can fit on the screen at one time. The extra vertical space was nice.
15" Screen - I actually don't mind this. 17" made sense at the time as I was using my laptop as a desktop replacement, but I now have a desktop as well, and I need to carry my laptop around more now than I did then.

In short, while I need to replace my laptop, anything I can afford seems like a step down in performance from what I have. Have I overlooked anything good on this price point?

To throw a slight complication into the equation, the laptop's hardware needs to be Linux compatible also.

PlanIT Computing

Argenis wrote: »

I bought a rather expensive laptop at the time 4 years ago. At the time, it cost around €1000. It has a 17" 1440x900 screen, 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 2 250GB 7200rpm HDDs and a Radeon HD 3650.

The laptop itself is on the way out. Battery life is around 50 minutes of MS Word. The plastic around the screen is all falling apart, and the screen itself is clearly at an angle when the laptop is closed which makes me worry the hinge might come apart. It heats up under even moderate use. In short, despite performing adequately, its in need of replacement. My budget is €600.

My problem is that when I shop around, for €600, most laptops I find have:

Roughly equivalent processors. Today's cheap end is pretty much where the better midrange stuff was when I bought the laptop.
4GB RAM - Exactly the same as my laptop. I would have thought tech would have moved up. Furthermore, unlike my years old laptop, most of these are not upgradeable to 8GB RAM (ok, DDR2 RAM costs a fortune so I wouldn't have updated my current laptop either, but..)
Slower, sometimes also smaller, hard drives.
Intel Graphics Cards - I'm sure the Geforce 520M can beat my laptops card, but I've only seen one laptop in the price range with it.
1366x768 maximum screen resolution - Not so much worried about the picture quality aspect, more about how much stuff I can fit on the screen at one time. The extra vertical space was nice.

In short, while I need to replace my laptop, anything I can afford seems like a step down in performance from what I have. Have I overlooked anything good on this price point?

If you keep your eye on the "Bargain Alerts" section of the board, you should be able to pick up a much more powerful laptop for €600.

JakHicks

This seems *close* to your price range.. http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/enigmaIII-520/ .. And you can configure it abit more. Prices are sterling though to watch the exchange rate 3 guys I know have gotten laptops from here and have had zero problems!