[RayzorEdge]

Asus laptops are a great value. I got one in the spring and it runs well. You can get a top of the line laptop from them for 800 bucks. Only drawback is it feels like it was made from the cheapest materials available. Not the sort of laptop you want to get rough with.

I have a Toshiba Sattelite A505 laptop I bought two years ago and its still going strong. Has a 12 cell battery, plenty of memory and hard drive space. Unfortunately, they quit making that model. The closest thing to it now is the Satellite P755. If you get a Toshiba though, make sure you go for the best one you can afford. Word is the cheaper ones are slow.

Avoid Sony VAIO at all cost. RetardedChimp can elaborate on that, but they're terrible.

I'd also avoid anything with an AMD processor. I bought a Gateway with an AMD processor, and it was nothing but trouble. It always ran hot, even if I wasn't using it. Playing videos on it was a pain. Some of that could have been Vista (boy was that a disaster OS) but when I tried upgrading it to Windows 7, it crashed 5 minutes after I turned it on every time. I found out it is the graphics driver and these idiots at AMD refused to release a driver that could run on Windows 7 upgraded Gateway machines.