said by banditws6 :

This is a timely question for me; my wife is in need of a new notebook computer and I'm looking at our options. She currently has a four-year old Dell Inspiron 8600; to its credit, it hasn't had too many things go wrong with it, but the build quality right out of the box was atrocious (with a key popping off the keyboard on day one!). It creaks and groans and feels like it's going to come apart at any moment. The screen also failed about 1 year into the extended warranty, which you can believe I was glad I purchased.

I myself use a Dell Latitude D620 when traveling on business, which is far and away a better machine than most of Dell's Inspiron series. But the Latitudes aren't made for entertainment -- mine has just one cheesy mono speaker, for example.

One thing is certain, I'm not buying any more Dell machines.

I'm surprised at all the good remarks about Acer. For some reason I thought Acers were only good in Asia and that the machine bearing the Acer name in North America were of poor quality. For those who like Acer, what store or website would you recommend I purchase one? My wife herself is from Asia and had an Acer notebook in 1998 which she liked.

said by hkancyr :

Take a look at Sagernotebook.com. I checked out the NP2070 upgraded a few things(processor to 2.2Ghz-Memory to 2 Gig's-HDD to 120Gigs-Bluetooth) for around $1100. Sager usually gives a lot of bang for the buck.
Once you do decide on something, go to Notebookforums.com and see what problems people are having with that particular model to avoid walking into something that was avoidable.

said by icyura10 :

This is the best one..

No batteries required; no screen to break; never reboots;