New Laptop

[mbpark]

I've owned 4 of these and a Powerbook.

If you want it to last a long time, get one of these. My Pentium 150MMX ThinkPad with Windows 98 and 48MB RAM is still kicking.

Panasonic is also a very good brand. If it's good enough for the Army (the Toughbooks are used heavily in Iraq), it'll put up with your damage. The only 2 laptop brands that are used over there in the desert that I have heard of are Panasonic and Apple. Everything else doesn't last as long.

The brands to avoid are:

Sony (crap build quality),
Gateway (can't get their firmware right to save their lives, and change from the Intel reference designs ever so slightly as to make using good qualified drivers nearly impossible),
Acer (poor build quality and lots of crapware),
Compaq (low-end HP and it shows),
HP consumer-level (rebadged Compaq, and that's NOT good - plus too much crapware to make the PC really usable. HP corporate is the exact opposite!),
Apple Macbook (too many problems with build quality),
Averatec (poor build quality and crap keyboards),
Toshiba (too much proprietary firmware and management software that doesn't work right, poor power management, and clunky build quality).

The brands I'd recommend are:
Lenovo Thinkpad (the gold standard for a reason),
Dell (unlike Gateway, they are really good about firmware and patches),
HP corporate-level (built like tanks and will last you a long time).
Apple MacBook Pro (unlike the MacBook, very high quality),
Panasonic (not well known in the US, and very high quality. They're not called Toughbook for nothing),
Itronix (the other brand of laptop you get if you work in construction).

Thanks,

Mitch

[Telefunken]

I have the HP dv6308nr and once I got Ubuntu 7.04 installed, I was a happy man.