Go into PC world with those requiremenst and they will bite your hand off! TBH you would probably be talking about £300 for a GOOD spec laptop with webcam etc. MS Office can be bought for £40 student licence or for an older versions (depends on what your work uses...we still have 2003 on some of ours) of MS Office for about £50. If you need to do work at home, ask your employer about installing a copy of theirs on your laptop. Some version of MS Office come with a limited USER license not limited machine. As long as the user is only on one machine at a time then it will work and is legal to do (we confirmed directly from MS!)

As for deleting data, if you are trading in, then as long as you go to high street store you would normally be OK. If selling privately you can get a "drive wiper" for free which doesnt delete your data, it overwrites it with blank data.

Sony or Toshiba are the market leaders. Majority of their laptops will come with a webcam built in now. Look for dual or quad core and 4gb ram. Majority of laptops come with Office 2010 installed, it is a full version but is tiam limited as a trial. You have the opportunity within the trial program to purchase the full licence for about £120 but when you order the laptop they will generally sell you the licence as part of the deal.

With regards to the data on your laptop the only tru way to make sure no one can get at your data is by putting a drill through it or taking the plates out of the drive and scratching them with a drill bit etc.

Dropping the laptop in water etc is not 100% as it is possible to take the disks out of the drive, dry them out and read the data off it. 99% of the population wouldn't know how to do it though.

Take the hard drive out which is located on the Left hand edge, it is held in by 2 philips screws. Pull the drive out and smash it to bits with a hammer. Put the rest of the unit on ebay as spairs or repairs. Screen is worth about £35, The charging board which also has 2 USB ports on, VGA out and the ethernet port sell for £25, Memory is worth a tenner, Hinges are worth about £15 (Common fault on this model) Motherboard is worth £75. You will only get these prices if you strip the machine down and sell it seperatley. Worth more as individual parts than it is as a complete unit.

DO NOT BUY FROM PC WORLD UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO LET THEM BEND YOU OVER AND BUM YOU LEAVING YOU TO PAY FOR THE PLEASURE.

They are nothing more than box shifters! All of the manafacturers sell direct from their websites that way your warranty is direct with the manafacturer. In my experience they also wont sell you a load of bollox that you dont need unlike PC World.

Pc world will push you to take a Copy of Norton Antivirus why, because they make a fortune selling that brand of internet security. They know that it is bloated and will slow your machine down. It will cost you around £40 Trend Micro titanium is regarded as the best currently and will set you back around £20 if you shop around.

[urlhttp://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/364747/trend-micro-titanium-internet-security-2011[/url

Also with Laptops don't rule out the Lenovo which is IBM rebranded. The IBM thinkpad was the business market leader for years.

IBM trying to shake off the Nazi association then?

btw cheers G, sounds like very good advice.

Whilst we're on about laptops, does anybody now where I can get a machine thats decent enough to surf the net and play a couple of games on. Hard drive space not really essential as I have an external. So just decent speed and memory, but nothing too special.

Reckon I'll get models from 2 years ago for £200?

Yed - appreciate the honesty, though a mytech 3-4 year old picture laptop is still better than that essex program!!

Something like this would be perfect

[urlhttp://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WHITE-DELL-Inspiron-1525-CoreDuo-1-73GHz-2GB-160GB-Win7-/180701130145?pt=UK_Computing_Laptops_EH&hash=item2a12a06da1[/url

added to watch list

Sony all the way Yed!

Go Mac

I resisted for years, now I feel like a tool for holding out for so long

Hilti nail blasted through the case. No spinny!

I have a Lenovo T400 (my work laptop) and also a Toshiba. Have been very pleased with both - although they are now (after a couple of years) slowing down. They take ages to boot up although the Lenovo works well once on. My older desktop is also now grindingly slow.

Why do computers do that? I've never been able to find a simple solution. None of them have masses of software on them, so why do they take so long to boot up and sometimes run slowly? Even when just browsing the internet or simply using a document?

Haha, it's not the spinny you have to worry about, but the data on the disks. Of course, put a nail through them (with enough impact) you'll up the magnetic field inside and would be akin to putting a magnet on it too.

Once you're done with that, burn it; literally.