Dell are junk.
The low end Dells are basically rebranded Asus models.

HP has some good models,.. beware of the lower end models.
Toshiba Satelite models are very good.
Sony Vaio's are hit or miss.
Acer is junk,
Almost any of the netbooks are junk,.. most only have 3 - 4 cell batteries.
Alienware used to be good but Dell bought them out and are now slowly turning into junk.


Expect to pay $800+ for a good laptop.
Dont need a high end CPU unless your doing gaming with it.
The Celeron chips are fine,.. AMD mobile are fine and even the high end Atom chips are fine. Will want 2 - 4gb ram minimum.
The high end models will have the better batteries and better hard drives. Stay away from ram drives. They are notorious for losing data. Get one with a real mechanical hard drive.

Hurst