Best laptop

I've only had two so far- one by Sony and one by Asus. The Asus is far superior to the Sony.

I have had the best luck with Dell and Sony. I prefer Dell because they tend to have more options that I am looking for in a high end machine. The Sony's I've had were very reliable. Both seem to have better quality screens that the othr brands I've had.

I'm using a Toshiba now, and I have no complaints about it that aren't Vista related (and I'm sure when my shiny new 1730 gets here it will have those very same issues).

Acer - meh, was very slow compared to another machine with similar specs, sold it within a week of purchase

Gateway - been many many years since I've used a new one, only ones I have are old and have problems for good reasons

HP - only worked on other peoples, and they were just spyware/virus issues so no real problems from my perspective

Compaq - Only bought one from 10 years ago and it still works fine to this day, neighbor uses it as her only computer (380mhz, 192mb ram, 6.4 gb HD)

IBM - been using them for years at work, not had good luck with them, seem to have a lot of odd issues, can't really tell if it's the hardware, drivers or all of the stuff our IT dept loads them up with.

Hypersonic - only Clevo I've ever owned and I never liked it. Of course the P4 was part of the problem but as much money as I spent, you'd think it would be faster than a Sony Vaio that cost half as much. Trying to get upgrade parts was a pain (would have to upgrade the mainboard) and I finally gave up and sold it.

Asus or Sony. I can tell good and so-so models on both brands, but generally, that's it. Btw, that's the reason I generally avoid comparing brands... sounds *somewhat* unfair, imo.

Every Toshiba I have ever bought was a gem.
I also imagine falcon northwest laptops would be reliable since they get beautiful warranties, though I never had the money for one =S

You confirmed what I said. I don't know which Toshibas you had, but the Satellite I have here at home is ages behind my Mitac in terms of build quality (even if it is lasting a looong time, because I take care). And the mitac is behind some asus'es of its time, too. So that's why generally I don't compare brands, specially when they have many many different models.

Go buy a Panasonic toughbook, you can run over one of those with a truck (for real, they even have a video of them abusing one) .

I had experience with Compaq (new), Toshiba (used), Dell (New) and Gateway (new). I like the Gateway the best.