taw will be the best person to ask on this. I recommend anything as long as it has a warranty if something goes wrong with it.

I know. I was going to post this in another forum I know, but there's a much bigger concentration of techies around here.

i have a gateway, but i dont know much about computers so i wont be much help lol, i heard that dells customer service isnt that great, my mom tried to get a dell laptop and they wouldnt listed to what she wanted and after about 2 days she got her order in, but then it got backed up and hadn't been sent after 3 weeks so she got a gateway instead(but now that they stores r closed i dunno how good thier support is either) best news is i got her old laptop that broke 1 week b4 the warranty was up so it has almost brand new parts

You can run, but run fast.... 1 shot is all I need.

Well I AM going to be buying used, so warrantys and tech support aren't much of an issue. I just want to know what brand is most likely to take a dump on me a few months down the road.

well my gateway has been good to me so far and it is about a year old

You can run, but run fast.... 1 shot is all I need.

HP, Compaq, Dell

tell me you're joking; their real names are Hopeless-Craptard, Con-Crap, D-Hell

in this order you should consider

IBM Thinkpad, Sony Vaio, Toshiba Satellite - forget anything else. You should be able to get a good deal on a second-user unit. but better buying new.

THIS is my school laptop, serves me quite well, but a bit lacking on the RAM side
Brands dont really matter to me (except dell, avoid them like the Black death), so ill offer advice on specs:

if ur looking for speed, get something with a P4, or possibly an AMD (i cant believe i said that), but if your running something resource-heavy, itll porbably get pretty hot (trust me, even my centrino gets hot) and drain ur battery pretty quick-like.
If its just office work and DVD's, probably go for a centrino, you wont need the Wireless card, but leave it anyway in case you go travveling. Ive found that mine can watch a full-length DVD movie without having to rechargeOr you could just get a PDA...

hope that helps

I really can't recommend buying a second hand laptop. At least not for significant money. Being a laptop user and having seen how they get treated, no matter how well reconditioned they may be, it's worse than buying a used car.

Because:

1) All laptops today have heat issues. The longer they have been used, the more heat that has been generated, the more heat fatigued the heat sensitive parts in the laptop.

2) The HDDs, if not new replacements, are a ticking time bomb as far as expected life is concerned unless they are the smaller volumed and 5400 rpm or slower drives.

3) General physical condition of the laptop screen, hinge and its connection to the video card is a common point of failure as the unit gets older.

4) The "hot swappable" drive slot , if used as intended.... hot swapping frequently, can be a source of failure at the most inopportune moment.

And, of course, some of the used units won't have the peripherals technology you want such as USB 2.0 compliance and built-in ethernet.

Toshiba are supposed to be good, and Acer laptops are acceptable (if you don't have a lot of money).

My choice, just because they look so good would be a Vaio if PC. I happen to think that those Powerbooks are pretty snazzy too.

i use a tashiba and ive only had to reformat it a few times, but thast mainly because off the games and dang security flaws microsoft has. but its a 30gig windows xp, and think its a 256ram, video card could use some work and the pcu tho...

but i havent had any problems with it

I dont recommend a Sony. Sure they look good, but they are overpriced and break down quickly.

I did research a while ago after I bought this laptop. Its a Toshiba Satellite A70. And I find that the LCD has imbalanced backlighting. Probably Toshiba trying to cut costs. But overall the laptop is good. Its a little heavy but thats fine cuz i dont plan on carrying it everywhere.

Oh, and what exactly do you need this laptop for? Would you travel a lot? Or is this just a cheap desktop replacement? Gotta answer the basic questions before you can get decent recommendations.

No hijacking intended. I will soon be in the market for a laptop. But, It will be 95% of the time used for writting stories and so forth on. Any good ones on the lowerend of the spectrum? *Note* I would be wanting to up ram to 1gb and running Work Perfect 12 mainly.

OH, and did you guys catch that AMAZING dell coupon a few days ago? $750 DOLLARS OFF!!!! Jeeez. You can get a pretty damn good $1500 laptop for HALF PRICE which that coupon. It was meant to boost their sales before the end of the quarter so the coupon wasnt a typo/bug. I tried to order one of their XPS systems but found out that it was US only. Bah.

And Dells arnt bad.

My ranking:

IBM ThinkPads (THE BEST, cept for their LCD brightness which is lower than average but probably to extend battery life, and a tad pricey), Dell, Toshiba.

You also might want to look into the eMachine line of Notebooks. eMachines have changed a lot from when they were known to shove crappy hardware into their computers. Their notebooks have been solid and cheap. Just go look for some reviews around.

Compaqs blow. HPs (yes i know they are the same company now but still) are a bit better...but id still avoid them.