First Notebook (bewildered)

I generally recommend whatever has the best graphics card first, since notebook graphics cards generally cannot be upgraded whereas other things can be. Either of the notebooks you mentioned would meet your needs, but I'd recommend the Packard Bell due to the better graphics card.

I'm also somewhat curious on how much traveling you plan to be doing with your notebook. Both the ones you linked to have 17" screens, so they're less travel-friendly than notebooks with slightly smaller 15-16" screens.

Your first ever lappy

Well, if you're not caring about games and such, you won't need a big heavy one with a good graphics card. What's on the market right now with vista, pretty much anything with a cpu at or above 2ghz, and enough ram (3gbs for what you're doing is plenty if not too much) will work fine.


Just fyi though, if you get a cheaper laptop around the 600-800 dollar mark (which is about the same you're looking for in pounds) Then yes whatever graphics it has are 99% of the time not upgradeable unless you get an external video card for an expresscard slot, usb (they're horrible) or your lappy can dock to something with a pci slot).

If you get a bigger laptop (15.4-17 inches) then there's a chance it's upgradeable, for a lot of the high preformace notebooks (ones that are expensive with 'great' graphics) that they definately are upgradeable and swappable to an extent (since the motherboard has a slot for the videocard and it's not built in, it makes sense too for the larger ones, since an integrated video card if it overheated would be super costly to repair instead of just swaping the vcard)

Personally I would try to pick a laptop with a newer cpu (ie. intel core 2 duo series), but both laptops you have there would do fine for you
FYI the laptops you've selected probably "could" have better graphics later......but the only way to know for sure would be to open it up and look for a spare slot, since both have integrated video.

The Packard-Bell one has a pretty good integrated chip, it's a downclocked version of the ATI 3200 by about 200mhz, but it is the same design so it should play things well nonetheless. I personally would go with that one. But I'm also a tad crazy so take your pic :P

Whatever you decide I'm sure will be fine.

Turion processors are just as reliable as Core 2 Duo processors. The current generation of them is just generally not as powerful.

^^ yep!

cheers ...