For laptop suggestions... I would extremely caution you to stay away from Sony at all costs. We had one in the shop the last week. Important files corrupted. I pull the hard drive out and backup what data I can for the guy, then run a lowlevel scan on the drive. It's just fine upto the second half/platter, then it completely fails to read.
Now, this is only a 3 month old laptop, so the guy figures he'll send it back to sony. But sony won't let him send it back. Seems they don't care what anyone says, you have to do it their way. So they want him to use their "restore" tool, that basically reimages the drive so it's just like it came from the factory. It works, of course, because the image is only 6GB or so, and it easily fits on the first part of the drive. Anyway, long story short, the guy argues and argues with sony for a week. Finally they agree to take it, but on the condition that if it's NOT broken, he has to pay charges and all that. Low and behold sony gets back to him two weeks later (poor fool has been out a computer for 3 weeks now) "Well, it seems you were right, the hard drive was bad." They ship it and he gets it a week later. A month without a computer.
Another story... This time with Dell. I go onsite and look at this computer. It comes on, "sometimes." LEDs flicker... bad power supply I think. Take it back to the shop, plug in a test power supply, and everything works perfectly. I call Dell up, give 'em the service code off the computer and the guy says "So what can we help you with?" "I need a new power supply?" "You know that for sure? Tested it with a known good or some such?" "Yup." "Okay, what's the address I should ship that to?"
They overnight it and first thing in the morning I get a shiny box from dell. Swap it out. Put the old one in the box, and then take the peel off label/waybill inside and stick it over the old label, call the courier service, and they come pick up the old one... All at dell's expense. They were without a computer for 18.5 hours.
Anyway, as for laptops, I don't know what features you need. I hear good things about the toshiba tablets, if you want a pen one. Dell is good for all around stuff, and as I pointed out, their service is good. For really good value, check out Averatec... they're on the low end, but definitely the best bang for your buck. I've had a 3270 for several months now and I love it. I use it all day at work, since I don't have a desktop machine there. I toss it in the backpack anytime I go on a call, and it holds up really well. Paid about 800 bucks for it, and it's nearly as fast my desktop machine (minus, of course, the video card.)
