Laptop recommendation for school

[Hi Ho]

My younger brother is heading to college and I have been enlisted to find a laptop for him to use. There will be no gaming on this laptop, just school work. Netbooks have been ruled out due to their small keyboards and lack of horsepower to play full screen video (this will be a Hulu/Netflix player as well).

My grandmother has offered to buy the laptop but only wants to spend around $400. I would rather spend a little more but that's the way it is.

I have been shopping around and I have found some seemingly good deals. The cheapest option I found was a 17" Toshiba at Wal-Mart for $348. The biggest problem with that one is the fact that it comes with Vista Home Basic (yuk) and no upgrade to Windows 7.

A specific Dell has caught my eye. The Inspiron 15 with one specific change. I added Vista Home Premium for $30 which makes it eligible for the free Windows 7 upgrade and brings the price to $519 after tax. Is this the best deal I am going to find? Does Dell still make solid laptops? The last thing I want to do is recommend a machine that will die in a year. This machine will be expected to last at least four years.

I have been very happy with my Toshiba laptop which has served me very well going on 1.75 years but other than the Wal-Mart model, they seem to be more expensive.

[alfie2]

have you check Lenovo's SL500. it's about the same price range as the dell.
$449USD before tax.
T4200, Vista premium( free upgrade to win7 ), with HDMI output.
better built quality as well.
if search the Internet, you can found ecoupons to reduce the price even further.
I know VISA credit card offers discounts as well paypal, if buy the laptop thru them.

[XenaWP]

I know Toshibas aren't highly recommended around here but I'm on my second one (first was used heavily for about 6 years) and I've never had an issue with them. The current generation has bright beautiful screens ... I watched some HD episodes of Dollhouse on mine and the picture is stunning. It was $399, with decent RAM and HDD space. I think they have a hole in that price range though at the moment ... they have $299 models with a very old Celeron processor, then a batch at about $500.

Hard to go wrong with Dell ... my company uses them and I hear of very few failures (and I'd bet a lot of them are opertor generated).