Laptops.

[bothered]

Hi all,
We are getting our Daughter a laptop for her 18th. It will be for general use with perhaps some gaming, watching DVDs and needs a wireless connection. What are the 'good' makes? I know Dell have a fair reputation but I don't want all the stuff that comes with them, plus I'd like XP on it but they only seem to offer Vista. Of the others I have seen I know some of the names and haven't heard anything about others so don't know what/who to avoid. Any recommendations?
Cheers.

Edit. Oh and we will probably spend around £700.

[bothered]

Bump.
Anything?

[Leonardo]

Dell just announced that select computers will still be available with XP. You might want to recheck their site. The Inspirons are good machines and the included wireless hardware is very good. As far as all the crapware preinstalled on laptops, hmm. You'd probably have to go to a premium or small label brand to get a blank disk with an OS CD. You can though, remove all the junk in about an hour with MyUninstaller and RegXPScrub. I just recently performed such sanitizing on a Dell laptop.

If you are concerned about all that garbage being re-installed if you have to restore the computer, just keep a fresh image and you wouldn't need the factory restore CDs (or restore sector on the hard drive). That's the way I'm doing it.

[bothered]

Thanks Leo. We ordered an Inspiron 9400 that seems to fit the bill. Still only a Vista option so we'll see how it goes.
Thanks again.

[RWB]

Guess it's too late to suggest powernotebooks.com? ;)