Notebooks Looking for a new laptop and being fussy about it. Help appreciated!

Perhaps it's a money making scheme of put all the power users on desktops then keep the mobile market for lemmings who know no better and buy any marginally improved rubbish each generation. I'm pretty sure there would be six core phones out there by now if power users were biting at manufacturer's heels enough - quads at the minimum

 

the ones from pc specialist are unbranded themselves, they dont even have pcspecialist on them or anything. they are literally just a ton of parts put into a chassis and done with it. and THEY must have got them from somewhere

il admit though i wouldnt build a laptop myself.

 

Merrh, all made in the same teepee

 

Just to give an update on this thread:
I eventually settled on ordering a Whitebook from Schenker notebooks in Germany.

I've seen some glowing customer reviews of the company elsewhere and their Whitebooks appear to be all either Clevo or MSI base models; which is fine by me.

XMG P511 Custom:
MSI Whitebook
15.6" 1920x1080 Matte screen as standard, which got very good feedback in reviews
i7 Sandy Bridge Quad Q2670M (2.2GHz)
8GB DDR3
GTX 570M
Crucial M4 64GB SSD


Total: €1328

I earned some extra money recently so I decided to push my budget out a bit for the same reasons that I bought a GTX 580 instead of a 570 in this thread.
The matte screen and GTX570M in a 15.6-incher are real deal-clinchers for me.

Interestingly, Schenker's other 15.6" base model (P501) comes with a GTX 560M instead for the same base price of €999 before customization. As far as I can tell from the pictures it's a Clevo instead of an MSI, but either brand is fine by me.

So far Schenker's customer service has been excellent. Very fast to reply to emails and very accommodating despite some payment issues caused by my bank and a delivery-address-change by me.
I'll update again when I've got my hands on the machine.

I was going to get something from the Asus N or G series and Bindi helped me to find what I was looking for but getting my hands on one with a matte screen in Ireland proved just a little bit too difficult due to a lack of resellers here and getting a 15.6" model with a GTX560M or better was even more difficult for the same reason.

 

Just last night i ordered a lenovo thinkpad edge from their website for £480ish.

13"
Core i3,
Hd 6630 gpu
4gb ram

If you spec your own and look around hopefully itll be cheaper to get a 15" version. Gotta love the lack of anything under 15". I spent 6months waiting for something like that. Still wondering what the smeg happened to llano laptops. HP being the only company that heard the cry of those wanting less than 15", those cries turned into cries of bitter disappointment and loss in faith in oem's

 

That really, really hasn't been my experience whatsoever in looking for a laptop, honestly. Trying to find a 15.6" that has sensible specifications has been one of the most difficult parts of my purchase process because of the apparent market dominance of sub-15" notebooks with low resolution screens.

Hell, even Alienware aren't even doing 15.6" models any more. Just a (pointless) 14" with a low-res screen or a ridiculous 17" desktop replacement; with no reasonable middleground.

 

Update:
New laptop arrived yesterday from Schenker.
The build-quality of the MSI base model is higher than I expected and overall I'm really pleased with the machine. The matte screen is beautiful. It gives brightness and colours at 50% brightness that my previous laptop only just about gave me at 100%.

The performance is fantastic, but I expected that with those specs. Booting up from cold in about 10s thanks to the SSD is just amazing; As is playing BF3 smoothly on High @ 1920x1080 on a laptop.
Getting 3-4 hours of battery life during general usage is pretty amazing too for a machine of this calibre.
The power brick is MASSIVE, though. Literally a brick.

Schenker themselves were very courteous and helpful and I can't fault them on an order being dispatched from Germany on Friday evening and arriving at my office in Ireland on Tuesday morning.
I'd definitely recommend them, going on my experiences so far and the quality of the build.