I have a had a lot of laptops in my time and bought a lot for other people in my office. Good brands: Acer, Asus, Lenovo Brands I have had problems with: Samsung and HP Get loads of RAm (8GB +) at least an i5 processor, a SSD and use dropbox, google or something else to put most of your stuff in the cloud. http://www.which.co.uk/ have a good laptop review section.