And a sub £450 MacBook? I can see why he doesn't want one.
I have a HP Pavillion dv6330ea, it's got slightly better specs compared to that one (and it was a Core Duo), but it was a bit dearer - but I bought it a while back. I would thoroughly recommend it, very good piece of kit.
As an alternative
this looks pretty good as well, for the price. If you're after storage with it though, you might want to invest in an external hard drive, like a 500GB one or something. (I know its a bit of a loaf to carry around, but I have one, and it's well worth it.)