Before looking to purchase a laptop about 2 years ago I decided I would be paying around £500 as I didn't want a bottom of the range nor did I want to pay a fortune as in the PC/laptop industry components get outdated very quickly.

I chose the M1530 XPS series from Dell as I loved the looks and from the reviews it was a good 'allrounder' ...now after 2 years it's still a great laptop and after a ram upgrade and a bigger hard drive it still outperforms the modern i3 laptops(off equivalent price) according to 3dMark10 and cpuZ. I went for the 2.4ghz dual core with the 256mb m8600GT nvidia card. Currently running 4gb of ram and a 500gb HDD it manages to run 3D max 2010 well to say autodesk do not support the graphics card according to their website. I'm a Product designer and so use Autodesk & Adobe software regularly of which it handles all programs well but multitasking can sometimes be an issue. This is with more than 5 programs running (using win7) this is where the 'I' series processors would stand out or a quad core.

Aside from the specs and performance the build quality is excellent which you can vouch for with most Dell laptops at this price range. The screen hinges are very robust and still after 2 years are still stiff. Came with Vista 32bit but runs 7 64bit well!

Some negatives; the touchpad can be inaccurate after returning from sleep mode (not a massive issue), the quick navigation panel (providing media player shortcuts) is difficult to press the buttons. The battery life isn't great with the standard 6 cell battery, defiantly worth a third party upgrade to a 9 cell battery.