what are you looking for exactly ... I do this all day for a living right now at my job we have a few machines that are great for the price ... but my personal favorite we sell at work is a MSI 15" with 4gb ddr3 and i5 ... 500 gb HDD bluetooth wireless N ... HDMI out its frigin SWEEET its 599 (us) and for the same price or a bit more you get an HP / Toshiba / dell with only the i3 in it But let myself or enigma know what your exactly looking for
Something minimal to run email, internet, music and such, priority features would probably have to be battery life and durability, but other things always add comfort =]
I just bought an Asus i3 with 4GB of RAM, runs for 5.5 hours, runs on integrated graphics but that is a blessing for the life, if you want a gaming laptop don't get a laptop? But really depends what your doing, definetly consider it, think I saw the same laptop floating around 499$ right now. I got mine off newegg but this is the same model no problems. http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6076017&Sku=F12-150018 and if you are some how in the wrong mind looking for a gaming laptop they have a fairly good deal for one beast of one here. http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6579158&CatId=4965 mind you I see the Alienwares with the 5870 CF and i7 for sale used all the time floating around 1k way over your price range but just to keep in mind, but they are at the price because they realized how useless a gaming laptop with that much power is.
if you arnt really planning on doing much with it you can always check out a netbook instead of a full blown laptop, personally i agree with erock, that 600 one would be a beast and get you by for pretty long time. personally for laptops i am a big fan of the macbook pro, but thats obviously beyond your price point.
Hey don't hate on gaming laptops. I had to get one cause I was heading off to uni Also my desktop was absolutely terrible. Graphics card was friggin Radeon 9550, I couldn't run games made after 2005 without lag
I agree, if you are just doing minimal stuff, a netbook would be excellent. I get upwards of 12 hours battery life on mine (around 6-7 when im playing games) and this thing will still run GW at about 12 FPS and it runs LoL very smoothly. It's a handy lil thing which is quite portable and durable and rather affordable too. This thing was only like $250 and with the upgraded battery it came out to about $300
The only reason I bought a laptop was because I was on the road constantly for two months. I bought one, then 2 weeks later my company put me somewhere permanent, which I'm very grateful for, but I spent a lot of my laptop, and now I rarely use it.
personally i dont like gaming laptops because you just cant quite match the power of a desktop plus the scalability of it is extremely limited (aka none)