What is the best laptop to get for a good price?

I've had good experiences with Acer laptops (everybody I know that has an Acer hasn't had any problems, no matter what model they had).

I have a Dell Vostro 1520 and it is absolutely sluggish. It runs really slow. I have the CPU meter widget running on my Sidebar and almost all the time my processor is at 99%. It's the worst for multitasking, as I can only have one program open at a time. I usually use Windows Media Player to listen to music but the sound skips out and stutters so much that I've opted for a portable MP3 player to listen to while I'm on the computer.

I've done some upgrades and even those don't do a thing. My processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5670 @2.10GHz. I have a Hitachi Travelstar 250GB hard drive, 5400RPM, 3.0Gb/s with a 16MB cache. I used Acronis True Image to clone my Fujitsu 120GB (originally from a Dell Inspiron 640m, manufactured in December 2006). I cloned the drive so I can put my music library back on (72GB in size, over 15000 songs).

My songs seem to be really slowing the machine down yet I've had the exact same songs (restored from a backup) on the original hard drive the Vostro came with (a Western Digital Scorpio Black 250GB, 7200RPM with a 16MB cache). I now have 4GB of RAM installed instead of 2GB, which the system originally came with.

When I first got this laptop it ran blazing fast (it was running Windows Vista Home Basic at first). I had my entire music library and only 87MB of space left on the hard drive yet it still ran really fast and smooth. I could have uTorrent, Firefox, Windows Media Player and Microsoft Word all open at once and be able to multitask without any problems.

In October I got a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (32-Bit) and upgraded from Vista. It still ran really good but some time in February my hard drive got a S.M.A.R.T. failure and it asked me to back up my files immediately because hard drive failure was imminent. That was when the laptop started to run sluggishly (due to the hard drive).

I replaced the drive with that Fujitsu which ran okay but as time went on, the computer ran slower and slower and even now with this 250GB, it still runs just as slow. I've had to re-install Windows 7 and all of my programs just to keep the system running relatively smooth.

I know the Scorpio Black blows all these 5400RPM hard drives I've used right out of the water because it was faster at a speed of 7200RPM. I'm using the Scorpio Black in my PS3 right now and it has no problems whatsoever. But I can't use it on my laptop anymore because I got a lot of disk I/O errors when trying to copy and move files to the disk.

I'm not going to waste any more time on this laptop because it's pretty much obsolete up to this point. I saw an ad for an Acer Aspire laptop in a Maximum PC magazine which had an Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM for about $600.

I don't really want to spend more than $600 but if I absolutely have to, I will save up just to get it.

Basically I want a laptop with a Core i5 processor, preferably quad core with 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive with a 16MB or even 32MB cache, if possible. It absolutely has to have a 7200RPM hard drive so the computer won't experience a bottleneck due to the speed of the drive.

I'm not sure if this Acer Aspire had a 7200RPM hard drive in it because newer laptops still have 5400RPM hard drives while others actually have 7200RPM drives.

If anybody knows what model I'm talking about, could you please direct me to a link so I can check out its specs? And if you know a good laptop that will last me about 2-3 years or so I'd really appreciate it.