Looking for a laptop

[DarkStar02]

I'm in college, looking for a laptop that can meet my needs. I need something 12-14", 13" ideal. Needs to have a decent processor (c2d?) and at least 2gb of ram. optical drive not important, battery life of at least 3 hours. It also needs to be able to push 1080p as it will be docked a lot on a 37" monitor. I'm trying to keep it around 600-700, 750 absolute max. So far I've looked at a used macbook (600-700), the dell 13v (450-700), the new HP 13" (unsure of price), or a used Envy 133 (hard to find, have seen them go for 700-800). I really like the look and price of the dell 13v, but the $450 one comes with a really crappy processor that I'd have to upgrade. does anyone know if I could do something like that myself? I'm fairly computer savvy and have built my own desktop rigs in the past. The only thing laptop related I've done was tear apart an old P3 dell lappy and add RAM to my moms notebook.

 

[clone63]

HP's 13"ers (DM and DV3's) can be found at 550. AMD+Intel versions.
For a bit fancier a Dell XPS M1340 (Intel C2D+9500/9400m), as cheap as 700.
Looks like 13z's have ULV cpus, meaning you're stuck upgrading to just another ULV (SU7300 is the best, I think?) which probably wouldn't offer noticeable gains. Good luck finding one of those, and they may even be soldered to the MB. Never operating on a low volt laptop. I'd recommend an HP for simplicity, though I can't say about their battery life.

 

[Adidas4275]

my dm3t (specs in sig) gets 6.5hrs of battery life on power saver.

gets around 4.5 on normal power browsing, video playback and such.

CPUs are not changable with the ULVs

 

[DarkStar02]

I'm leaning more toward the dm3 but I'm going to call dell tomorrow and see what they can do for a student discount or something to sweeten the deal for a v13. I looked at a teardown video and the cpu and gpu are both soldered to the mobo. I also like the HP tx2500z's tablets because they're so cheap but I've read they die after about a year or two. I wonder if they've fixed that with the new tm2 model..?

recap:
intel c2d macbook, $650 used
amd turion x2 hp tx2500 tablet, $550 questionable build quality
amd neo x2 hp dm3 notebook, $500 on sale
intel celeron or culv dell v13, $450-650, dunno if the price difference is worth the performance difference between celeron and culv processors