I need a new laptop

[NCLI]

I'm leaving Denmark for a year this April, and I need a new laptop, since I'm not bringing my 20+ kg desktop machine and one of my 24" monitors with me, and my netbook is too underpowered to be my main system.

Anyway, do you guys have any recommendations?
It doesn't need to be screaming fast, I just need a system which is well built, can play 1080p mkv's and fairly recent games, and browse the net without any problems. It also needs to be fairly portable, and have a screen size of somewhere between 12-17".

It would be awesome if it could convert into a tablet, for testing utouch.

[3Miro]

Get a 15.6 inch laptop with Nvidia video and i5 CPU. The rest depends on the things like Battery life (Nvidia GTX460 will burn way more than a 330, but the former will be considerably faster) and of course money. You can go with i3 or i7 CPU as well, I wouldn't go for Core 2 Duo unless money is really tight.

[NCLI]

Anyone else?

[NightwishFan]

I have an Asus machine and it works superb. All open source drivers (granted I have an Intel GPU, and not a Nvidia). Have fun in your travels. :x

[MooPi]

I second the Asus vote. They always seem to put a quality laptop together. I don't work on laptops (new career pc repair) but the man I work with commented recently the distinct quality difference of an Asus.

[stefan73]

Personally, I'm in love with my Lenovo T500. Ubuntu works great on it, blazing fast with SSD to boot from, room for second hard drive, great build quality en screen...

[alababi]

Mine is a vaio e, I use windows 7 mostly for games and some engineering softwares ( it has an ATI 5650 which can handle every game at medium settings), Ubuntu 10.10 just runs really well ( it got a sound problem with 10.4 because of the old alsa version). And furthermore, you can use splashtop if you need to go to the net immediately, it takes less than 30s to go to my gmail from a cold boot with my laptop.

You can choose the 14" model, it got the 1020 screen option as I recall.