need laptop

[catastrophy]

I need to get a laptop (I've gone far too long without a dedicated pc...).
If you have advice or recommendations on brand/model, let's hear 'em.

My Specs:
Must run Windows 7 (No Vista!)
Have internal optical drive (I can live with out)
Portable (I favor battery life and lightweight over display)
Decent battery life (3 cell with low energy use, or maybe 6 cell)
Price under $500 pretty please?

EDIT
Current front runner: $500 Toshiba Satellite T115D (AMD Athlon™ Neo X2 Dual-Core, Windows 7, 2GB memory, 320GB hard drive)

Any opinions on the HP Mini or Dell Mini 10 / Inspirion 11z?

Comments

[illuminatedwax.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about what I would suggest, but I have about zero good experiences with Dell computers, and HP is better but not much higher up the list.

[idothattopeople.livejournal.com]

My Acer Aspire One (sans optical drive) was a pretty good secondary computer, until it broke. The 10" netbooks are extremely cheap, super cute, and really easy to carry around. For me, the only downsides are that the screen is small and the trackpad is annoying---if you use netbooks for long periods of time, it's more likely that you will be conscious of the computer's limitations than if you were using a big-ass laptop.

[(Anonymous)]

$479: TOSHIBA Satellite L505D-LS5010 NoteBook AMD Athlon II M300(2.0GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR2 800 250GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi ATI Radeon 4100 - Retail

Honestly, I would guess the price of older Core2Duos will go down in price, as Intel has released the Nehelem cores back in January. I suspect liquidation would start this summer, but that's just my guess.

I have a HP Pavilion dv2000, and it's great, except for the fact that HP skimped on design of the GMU heatsink. This means the temperature spikes to 85 Celcius when I play games. Kinda crappy, actually. Other than that, I'm seeing laptop prices dip as vendors prepare for new ones. I would suggest you wait till the summer/fall to purchase a decent Core2, but as I peruse Newegg, I see decent laptops for under $500. Also, don't bother with SSDs yet, they're still the size of flash memory sticks, and the benefit isn't justified unless you're a news reporter who needs that little shaving of weight and battery life in trade for a drive that's 1/40th the size of conventional laptop HDs.

My two cents, anyway. /v/gmas.