Laptops????

Actually, Lenovo is a Chinese company that bought the Thinkpad line from IBM

 

Lenovo is a good company, as is Asus and Acer, I promise you. The only problem with Acer is that it comes with alot of cool software thats pretty much useless, but what computer doesnt? You can get rid of it and it runs like a dream. I love my machine to death. I just bought an 250 gig external hard drive so now I have 370GB of memory. and I have Linux on this baby as well, dual booted, 30 gigs for its own little partition. It's a wonderful computer. Looks great too with the Carbon Fiber.

 

Acer makes Ferrari themed laptops. Oops, already been covered....
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If you plan to upgarde to vista make sure you have a lot of RAM. (I wouldn't recommend the upgrade at the moment, its just a pretty verison of XP with more bugs and no new features for the average user). I think 2 Gigs should be good if you plan to upgrade. Also make sure you get a notebook with a dualcore processor or at the least a 64bit one.

As for manufactures right now I'd say go with HP or Dell. I don't think it is that vital. It is more important how you treat the comp (anti-virus, adaware etc)

If you find one in the stores that matches what you need then great. If not check their websites, you can fully customize it to what you need based on hard-drive, RAM, videocard etc. I found most of the ones in stores had features I didn't really want (200 Gig hard drive) and thought that I'd rather save moeny there and put it towards other options. If you have any questions feel free to PM

All in all for you are probably looking at around $1k

EDIT: Based on what you described, most any laptop should be fine for you, the average notebook has plenty of power. Surfing the web requires minimal power from a comp, and playing back media isn't a big deal either. It's really only necessary to get a big power one to brag or if you play games or do a lot of video editing.

 

Robbie,

I use both a Dell Latitude X1 for travel and a Sony Vaio for around the office. Both are outstanding, the Sony was overpriced IMO.

MTC

 

Sony Vaio's are overpriced. They look good, but I mean, it's just so expensive, it's how all Sony products are (like the PS3). Let us know what you end up getting