Laptop recommendations

[kaiowas]

I'm pretty much out of the loop these days hardware wise. I very rarely need to buy anything so I haven't bothered keeping up to date, unfortunately my shuttle appears to have died, looks like a blown capacitor on the motherboard which i'll have a go at replacing. If it works great if not I need to sort myself out with a new computer and i'm looking at getting a laptop.

Thing is I've never shopped for a laptop before and I don't really know what I want or need. Spec wise I don't need anything particularly special, I rarely do much more than browse the net these days. I'd prefer to stick with XP if possible, from what I know of vista (which isn't a lot admittedly) it doesn't offer me anything new that I need whilst just needing better hardware to run eye candy I don't care about.

Only hardware requirements I can think of at the moment is that I'd like an external sata port if possible. I've been using it on my shuttle and I don't think I could go back to the slowness of running external drives over USB. Not even sure if anyone makes laptops with eSATA but I'd like it if possible. I'm also not looking for something huge. If I want a big screen i've still got my TFT I can hook up to so I'd prefer the laptop to be sensibly sized rather than being massive to accomodate a big widescreen display.

Looking to spend about £4-500 although I can go higher if there's a good reason to do so. Anyone got any comments, recommendations of brands/models/stores to avoid or look out for? Any good bargains about atm? As I said I tend to buy hardware pretty infrequently and I'd like to keep it that way so I want something that will last me a good while.