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I have a tower PC and a Laptop both of which use Vista, these two are now reaching the end of their days and l want to replace with a new Laptop.

I no longer have to do any clever stuff on a PC and am just looking for a Laptop which l can use at home or carry around with me overseas for keeping in touch and surfing etc.

Not looking to spend a lot of cash, l guess around ?400, have tried Windows 8 but just dont like it. I am aware that windows 7 works very similar to Vista but the likes of Currys/PC World can only supply Windows 8 loaded Laptops.

Any advise, looking for new and not pre used, and not interested in a Tablet, ideal size 15.6".

If you choose a model that has drivers for Windows 7 on the manufacturers website and pay the price premium for Windows 8 Professional you can legally downgrade to Windows 7 Professional.

Work have just bought some Dell 3540 with i3-1.7GHz CPU, 4GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit. They are rather lethargic but I guess the performance of other manufacturers systems of similar specification will be similar.
I don't know if Windows 7 32-bit and/or i5 CPU of similar speed would boot and run faster for general purpose browsing etc.

All I know is I'm typing this on a Fujitsu laptop with a Core 2 Duo 2GHz running XP and it's much faster.
OK I was lucky plus spent a bit of time but PC less Hard drive was just over ?40, 2GB RAM ?8 and genuine PSU ?10 all including delivery on eBay, 320GB Hard Drive from CEX was ?28 so total about ?90.

i3 is supposedly better performance than similar speed or faster Core 2 Duo and definitely much lower power so smaller & lighter battery on Dell runs for longer.

Generally from experience the difference between two systems of similar specification but different price is the build quality and long term ' own brand ' / lesser brand systems fall apart sooner than Fujitsu, Toshiba etc.

Try and find a place that will give you a free downgrade to Windows 7. Lots of people are asking for it.

If you don't use a laptop for anything other than using the internet then havea look at the Chromebooks. Cheap, quick boot up and no messing with virus scans and whatnot.

I didn't like Windows 8 at first. Now that I'm used to it, I see it's as good or better than 7, which I thought was the best Windows so far.