What laptop should I get?

First rule of thumb: STAY AWAY FROM DELL. A budget laptop with “moderate” features such as you are seeking will be alright for now, but will cause you headaches 2 or 3 years down the track. There’s a reason why Dell is so cheap. And its not a good one.

For a budget laptop, I would think you’d be looking at Acer and Compaq as brands (try to find Asus if you can also - they actually manufacture the Macbook for Apple). I would lean towards Acer more than Compaq personally - Compaq laptops are usually HP laptop’s with certain features removed, and from what I’ve seen Acer come with more features and tend to be cheaper. My parents and my sister both have Acer laptops, and have not had any trouble with them.

Now, in terms of specs… you want to run Vista. That’s cool, nothing wrong with that. So, to give you a good laptop with nothing in the way of performance issues:

• CPU/Processor: Really try and get Dual Core (probably looking at AMD rather than Intel), 1.6GHz probably as a minimum in terms of clock speed for Dual Core: 1.8GHz minimum if you have to get a single core.
• RAM: 1 Gb of Ram, or buy a laptop that can be upgraded to 1 Gb and then buy the extra Ram to put in it. Trust me, you’ll need the extra Ram to run Vista properly.
• Graphics: you don’t want to play any games. So graphics aren’t really an issue, but to make sure your computer is reasonably capable get the right version of Vista.
• Hard Drive: 80Gb will be fine, even better if you can get 120Gb.
• Optical Drive: Almost all laptops can read and write CD’s & DVD’s these days.
• Operating System: You said you want Vista. In my experience, get Vista Home Premium - Vista Home Basic is a “compromised” version of Vista designed to run on computers that aren’t up to spec, and it can cause compatibility headaches. If the computer has Home Premium, it will be a more reliable & future-proof machine.

Hopefully, that covers it!