£650/$1000 budget laptop

Hi guys,

I don't know much about laptops and this seems like such a helpful community, I thought I would ask you guys for help. Basically the situation is that I own an old Acer Aspire 5535 that I used for gaming and work, but recently I have found modern games very unplayable and that the laptop receives a lot of system errors, so I have set out to replace it. With my A levels starting, I thinking this would be a nice thing to have for the work, and hopefully will last me thought university.

I do game quite a bit, so this would be primarily a gaming laptop, but I would like it to last me for my work.

Here is my list of needs:


1. What is your budget?
My maximum budget is £650 (about $1000)

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
At least 15".

3. What screen resolution do you want?
I am very flexible with this, bare minimum would be about 1024 x 600.

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
Definitely portable, but it would be plugged into a charger the majority of the time.

5. How much battery life do you need?
As said above, the majority of the time it would be plugged in, but 3 hours battery life would be a nice amount, again, flexible.

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?
I will be using this laptop for quite a bit of gaming and I'm hoping this budget could get High settings, but I love Medium settings too if I need to.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
Word processing, Internet browsing, photo and video editing (infrequently)

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
At least 500GB on a single HDD.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
Any site is good for me, but will be avoiding American sites for obvious reasons.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
5-6 years. (I am aware this may mean gaming future games on low settings but I'm fine with that, I will be using it for the other purposes too.)

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
Just a DVD ROM.

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.
HP - good reputation and cheap
Dell - excellent reputation
Acer - the only brand I have used and has lasted me this long

13. What country do you live in?
England

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.
I don't mind using AMD CPUs.


Thanks everyone