Here my experience with few laptop below.

HP NC 4200 - within 1 year the laptop already die twice on me and had change the entire mobo twice. Lucky still under warranty

IBM Thinkpad T & R series - very reliable and never had any hardware failure. Never call for their support therefore no idea how good ibm support is. Cons, freaking bulky

Now using acer ferrari 1000 - after using it for almost 4 months, kinda satisfy with it. No failure face so far.

So far, from what I heard and experienced, the best customer service among all laptop sellers is DELL.

I have 2 laptops, one is Toshiba and another is Dell.

For Toshiba, after using it for 3 years, its CMOS battery has been used up. I called up Teledynamic.
They passed my line from department to department acting like they didn't which department should be accountable for the task.
Just to get some information, I made 5 calls.
At last, they told me that they don't have the stock for my model.
But, they can order it for me. It takes 2 to 3 weeks to have the replacement unit to reach them.
It will takes another 3 to 4 days to replace the battery for me.
The most ridiculous part is they are going to charge me RM 1XX workmanship (forgot the exact amount) for changing a RM 60 battery in the case that I'm sending them myself the unit.

Now, using Dell.
So far so good.
If anything happens, just call them up.
The lady over the phone in a nice tone will ask me to hang up my call after getting my Service tags No.
She will call back to me immediately just to help me to save a few cents of my phone bills.
If the problems cannot be fixed over the phone, she will lodge a report and ask her technician comes to my place ( office or home, you decide ) to fix it for me.
The best part is the technician most likely will bring a new unit to my place and fix it before me.

This is most important if you have some things really personal and confidential stored in your laptop, I think you won't be sleep tight at night when your laptop is fixing in the factory while someone might browse through your personal data.

Thus far, I have made such call twice.
They came and replaced the motherboard twice and LCD once.
Even a minor problem like network card is not function properly due to loosen connection (sometime detected, sometime not detected), they will exchange the motherboard and network card at once.

Just on March, my Complete Cover warranty is due.
I'm very happy to extend it for another two years.
Now, I especially like to have my laptop run on raining and lightning days.
Of course, as long as all my important data is secured.

I'm taking that as a compliment to IBM, hahaha...

There are so many different warranties and supports out there, could be quite misleading sometime (like this one is covered and that one is not, sounds like my insurance policy)

Just to relate my experience with IBM, specifically with their T43 bcz that was the one i abused while working as an auditor. It survived all the bumps and knocks.

Lets just say that I never wanted to go with any other brands after actually using one of those and in fact, bought a 2nd hand T43 for personal use when for that price i could've owned lappies with C2D and the likes...

I rarely hear anyone saying that they returned their IBM for warranty purposes, that is definitely a positive note.

So yeah, I prefer IBM as far as i'm concerned for now =)

go for vaio
style is more important than specs

True I myself would say that a compliment on the thinkpad series. The best support would be you wont need to call the support at all. Many always claim dell had the best support but they never think another way, dell always sell you problematic products. Eventhough the company can provide you service in a very fast speed, but you still losing time on waiting and especially when you had some important work to due

then after a few months ..ppl will say " look at that dude, he is still using that old Style Vaio" update sikit la ..haha

Hahaha...its a Sony wor, give face a bit lah..at least 1 year la.

Anyway, my point of view is that both function and style are equally important. However, function comes first and then style.

hehe .. ya must have a balance actually..juz take what u think suits u the best ..in terms of style and also specs hehe

Actually, i think have to take into account the built quality also such as the built of the joints, material used as housing for the laptop.

My fren's laptop LCD surrounding plastic housing actually bent as time goes by, and now the lid cant close properly. damn...it was an acer btw.

HP got Pavillion D series and T series... then got compaq presario DV3 and 6 series...
Pavillion D are like high performance mobile desktop... T series are Tablets... DV6 are normal mobile desktop... DV 3 are normal cheapest notebook from HP...

Any1 here know anything bout this...? quite similar to Vadim but this site looks cooler...

dell lappy has the uncle looks design

i thought 3 yr old laptops
those early introduction to computers where they learn abc.
but dell is value for specs, undeniably

My experience after 5 years having a Dell Latitude; it won't win awards for aesthetics, and back then the body was all plastic but still tough. I have had people knock my Dell down while I was playing CS and it fell to the floor from a height of more than 4 feet. Still running even today but the CMOS battery (i think) that powers the clock is dead, and the hinge for monitor kaput on one side. Oh and it came with Samsung SDRAM.

Dell utilities CD is also useful compared with other brands. my 2 cents.

Except for XPS i think. That machine looks cool to me, but the air vent on the side is damn hot when it's running, almost burned my palm while i was playing FIFA 2007 on my friend's XPS.

i sell toshiba laptops and the new satellite m200 series sure looks good ...

i think they have 1 of the best laptop speakers around ... (Harman/Kardon)

just tested the new satellite m200 ... beats the hp altec big time ...