Thanks very much for your reply mate, It's just a few people have told me to steer clear of HP and Dell . . .
Of course - if you speak to enough people you will find someone to slag off every manufacturer - my neighbour (IT guy) used to swear by Dell, my brother had the worst customer experience ever with Dell and won't touch them with a bargepole.
My budget is £500 or less really. I'll mostly be using for internet, skype.. a little bit of photography but nothing too intensive and the odd game but again, not anything super graphics reliant.
Screen has to be great and I usually have lots of stuff open... LOTS of stuff, so RAM is fairly important too . . .
If you can stretch to £500 there is loads of choice.
If you run lots of stuff at the same time (I certainly do) you should probably put all your money into getting the best processor you can and that almost certainly means looking at an i5. As far as RAM goes 8TB would keep everyone bar a photoshop pro working with raw files happy so no need to pay for any more. Screen resolution is pretty much the same on all machines at this price point but if you shop around you will find matte (fewer reflections and bettter for work) and glossy options (pain in the ass in daylight but richer blacks and colours for watching movies in subdued light). You can always by a bigger IPS monitor to hook up to it later. I would not shell out for a massive HDD either, 500GB to 1TB should be tons, and if you need more you should probably be looking as a NAS/external storage - too risky trusting all your data to a laptop.
A decent processor is what will make the machine feel snappy and responsive - the recent generation i5 processors (5th gen at this price) will have competent graphics performance and should play plenty of older games at reasonable quality. The cheaper i5 chips have two physical cores but with hyperthreading operate as quad cores - they are clocked slightly higher and tend to wipe the floor with AMD in most of the benchmarks. AMD recover some ground on heavily threaded applications like rendering and video encoding but the gains are often marginal. I used AMD chips in my desktops all the time because they offered a great balance between price and performance. Sadly AMD have lost so much ground to Intel over the last few years that some folk think they may even pull out of the enthusiast market altogether. My next build will almost certainly be based on an i5.
Anyway couple of i5 machines to consider:
Hewlett Packard HP 350 Core i5-5200U 2.2-2.7GHz 8GB 500GB 15.6" £379.97
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/hewlett-packard-hp-350-core-i5-5200u-2.2ghz-8gb-500gb-15.6-dvd-sm-win-7-pr-k9j04ea/version.aspAsus X555LA Laptop, Core i5 5200U 2.2-2.7GHz, Full HD 1080p, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD £399.98
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/156-asus-x555la-laptop-core-i5-5200u-27-ghz-full-hd-1080p-8gb-ram-1tb-hdd-dvdrw-ac-wifi-plus-bt-40-wIf you have £100 left in your budget maybe look at swapping out the HDD for an SSD, you can pick up 240GB for under £50 now:
Crucial BX200 240GB
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/240gb-crucial-bx200-25-ssd-sata-iii-6gb-s-sm2256-micron-16nm-tlc-nand-540mb-s-read-490mb-s-write-78kAlternatively some external storage:
Samsung M3 Slimline 2TB Portable Hard Drive
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-samsung-m3-slimline-25-portable-usb-30-20-25-hard-drive-carbon-black-bus-poweredOr a NAS!
Synology DS216SE Dual/2 Bay NAS
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2-bay-synology-ds216se-desktop-nas-enclosure-800mhz-marvell-armada-cpu-256mb-ddr3-ram-gbe-2x-usb2-up(you would need to add at least one HDD to this).
Best of luck!