and its beyond repair -can anyone assist with a recommendation up to £500 - dont want a netbook nothing bigger than 15" mostly e-mail and net use but some apps in word excel and maybe a few games but not so important although FM09 would be good.

The Acer 2930 has a good spec but not sure about the graphics??

Cheers

aldi usually do decent stuff,always seem to get a good write up in computeractive

What about claiming on the house insurance?

At the price, the build quality of Dell is significantly better than Acer imho ... which may be a consideration if you're in the habit of bouncing them

Other than that this site seems to have chapter and verse http://www.thelaptopauthority.com/

thats what i did but they try to give you a similar spec to your broken one

sony vaio are far the best you can get imo, i got mine for under £500 from currys

Thats not my experience and I've had two new ones from the insurance company. Think about it, if a laptop is more than 12 months old its pretty impossible to give you a replacement of similar spec, they don't go around buying second hand ones. The spec you bought a year ago is long since obsolete so they invariably give you a better one than you broke.

I broke the screen of a three year old vaio laptop and they gave me an up to date vaio as a replacement. It's due for breaking again though :)

doesnt your premium go up if you claim tho?

Aye. 20 odd quid. Cheap laptop that innit!

anyone with any specific model recommendations?

Don't replace it. You're obviously not safe with one. You'll only bounce it again or tread on it or summat.

Just bought an Acer Aspire Notebook today 120g hard drive 220 quid. Its only got a 9 inch screen but its small compact and great for surfing the net in bed

So small enough to use one handed then

Our lass sorts that bit out when she doesnt have a cream cake in one hand and womans own in the other

I've narrowed it down to these two slightly different machines

The acer is £500 the Samsung only 300 mostly to be used for web browsing but word / excel applications would be useful


Acer

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T5800
(2 GHz, 800 MHz, 2 MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista (R)Home Premium
2 GB Memory
250 GB Hard Drive
12.1" Widescreen Display
DVD ReWriter Optical Drives
Wireless N connectivity
Webcam
Wireless Enabled

Samsung

The new black Samsung NC10 Netbook is an ideal portable computing solution. It offers a massive 160GB Hard Drive, 1GB memory and Windows XP operating system. Performance computing wherever you are!
Intel Atom N270Processor - Energy efficient
Operating System - Windows(R) XP Home
Memory & storage - 1GB Memory & 160GB HDD
Portable - 10.2" Widescreen Display & 1.3KG
Extras - 7.5hrs battery life & Bluetooth


Any views most helpful

Also wil the acer play any games? Intel graphics ie FM09 guess the n10 wont

I can only tell you that my Misses obtained an acer in the last year . She does a lot of genealogy research on it and has a wireless connection into our internet provided by Bt. She's highly delighted with it and it was obtained by a good deal from Ebuyer.com based in Sheffield who deliver without fail. No after sales service I suspect but we haven't needed it.

Son who is coordinator of IT in a school also took the recommendation and got a higher spec acer after being disappointed with a Dell cheapy.

hope it helps but don't sue me.