What's a good laptop?

I’ve got a 17” HP DV7 Entertainment. This thing is fast and the battery life is ok, but it’s a little big for your tastes, it seems. I absolutely love it though. It runs about $700 but it works like a much more expensive model.

We have a linux based ZaReason Hoverboard it doesn’t have a dvd drive but they have other models that do.

My husband just got an Asus laptop from Bestbuy. I only got to see it for a few days while I uploaded some stuff on it, but it was really nice. I would post a link, but it won’t work with the coding on fluther. If you go to Bestbuys website and search for “Asus laptop” it’s the first one that comes up. It was right around $500.

The Acer Timeline series has a few good models, as does the Toshiba Satellite series.

One thing you should know is that most 15” screens use the same resolution as the average 13”; they just use bigger pixels and thus look “grainier”. Also, that is about the size where most people stop carrying a laptop and start just parking it on their desk, if for no reason other than weight; 6–8 pounds compared to 4–5 pounds for a 13”.
Accordingly, many 15”+ laptops care less about power consumption (and therefore battery life); the backlight on the screen is one of the bigger draws on the battery and bigger screens require more power to light. (Of course, that matters very little if it’ll be plugged in all the time, but then you really don;t need a laptop.)
So you really have to specify what you consider “decent”.

If 3 hours is good enough for you then the Toshiba L650 may work for you. If you want something closer to 6–9 hours like I get with my T135, then you should consider a 13” since many of them are designed for all-day computing and are easy to tote around.

Let us know a little more about what you want and we’ll see what we can figure out.

The Dell Studios are really nice, very reliable, and reasonably priced.