moving down to bunbury so I need a laptop. Have no clue about whats the go with em, I have around $1500 to spend

any recommendations and places to go and buy ?

Can get quite a few half decent units for that kind of money these days.

The new HP's aren't bad, Dell are always a fairly safe bet too.

ASUS - Never had an issue after three lappies. Not the fanciest case, but they make up for it with value for money.

Same with Acer, hardly ever crashed and pretty good packages available. Although I had an Acer last year (salary sacrifice woo hooo). But it shat itself just after warranty ended. I was treating it a bit rough though.

Get a small hard drive in the Laptop + get an external hard drive for 1/5 the price. Still very portable.

*spit* *spit*

I'd never, ever recommend spending money on Acer hardware.

I used to do Acer warranty jobs, by christ it's some nasty, horrible, downright shit hardware.

The cheap IBM series ('i' series I think?) laptops are also essentially rebadged / rebodied Acers.

Steer well clear. For every positive Acer story, there's three dozen woeful ones.

yeah, well I did say it shat itself.

Amen to that - Id have to say ASUS make the best notebooks of all.

On top of being great quality, with every ASUS you get a 2 year global warranty, carry case and mouse.

We sell quite a lot of ASUS notebooks at work. They have some new models coming out very early January that I would look at.

If you are interested in prices, I'm back at work on January 2nd

Another vote for Acer.

Tried and tested in the toughest environments and still go strong.

which acer model should I be looking for

scuse da french... but stay the hell away from Acers. Some of the dodgiest plastic pieces of shit i have every seen. I used to work on the notebooks in the 'notebooks for teachers program'. Had so many problems with hardware just randomly failing. Then spending numerous hours on the phone to some dodgy non english speaking lady somewhere in asia trying to explain the problems...

HP or Asus FTW