Any laptop recommendations/advice?

[kernow_joe]

I PERSONALLY wouldn't touch Toshiba with a barge pole these days...

Lenovo are about the only brand that seems to be any good, along with HP Business line Laptops... HPs Home end stuff is very poor...

Samsung aren't TOO bad, but around the £300 mark, they aren't going to be own design Samsungs, they'll be rebranded stock designs...

Are you looking at brand new?

If I were to go tomorrow and buy a laptop for £300 I'd head straight to ebay and get an IBM T61 - they're the LAST of the PROPERLY built laptops IMO, that or a top spec HP Business Line - Like an NC6400 or a 6910P - even the early ProBook 6930Ps aren't bad, they aren't posing laptops, they look industrial, but they will last you a lifetime... I've currently got an NC6400 with 4GB Ram, 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo and it does everything I need it to and more... It's probably worth about £150-200, but I'd take it every day over a brand new poorly built Chinese Sweatshop Toshiba/Medion/Acer...

That's my personal opinion on the matter.

this^
which is why in my house hold there are a few x61 and t61 laptops, awesome machines.

the funny thing is, windows 7 is able to do touchscreen just fine...

But yeah, its like everything with microsoft good then bad:

Windows 98 SE (good)
Windows 2000 (great)
Windows ME (worst operating system ever)
Windows XP (good)
Windows Vista (horrific, but better than ME)
Windows 7 (Good)
Windows 8 (not bad, but 7 is still better)

at least as its going forward the worst os's are not as bad.

I think you mean 'its like everything with microsoft just plain bad:'