Lenovo, Dell or HP, and not a "MSRP starting at" model. I'm a Lenovo guy, have been for 10 years, and I abuse my laptops, badly - never had a failure.
When I was still fixing computers for a living, I rarely came across a Lenovo that had any sort of hardware problem other than those caused by users (spills, drops, and so forth). In fact, I'm not sure I ever came across a single one. I had my doubts when IBM sold their PC line to the Chinese, but they seem to have maintained and possibly even improved the quality of the brand. I certainly had more repair calls for IBMs than I ever did for Lenovos. My lack of experience with Lenovo despite their respectable market share tells me they're doing something right.
That being said, the business-class HP machines have always packed more bang for the buck, in my opinion, even without the employee discounts I used to get on them when I belonged to HP's credit union. Their consumer-grade machines are more of a crap shoot. They aren't bad at the higher ends of the lines, but they tend to be
very underpowered at the low end. The consumer-targeted machines also come with absurd amounts of crapware on them that you don't get with the machines marketed to business users.
On the down side, although hardware failures on HP machines were pretty rare, their older machines (including the desktop lines) seemed intentionally designed to be hard to work on and used a lot of proprietary parts, all of which were overpriced if out of warranty. The newer machines are no different to work on than any other manufacturer's, but a lot of the power supplies are still proprietary. I routinely ordered spares, but don't recall ever actually installing one. I have a spare for my own desktop HP machine in the closet dutifully gathering dust.
Dell was a mixed bag. I fixed more Dells than all other brands combined, and many of the problems were in fact design or manufacturing defects. On the other hand, their machines were designed to be easy to work on, and they were very good about replacing faulty parts -- right down to motherboards -- even if the repair company wasn't an officially-authorized Dell service center. I guess that's because they were also okay with shipping parts directly to consumers for DIY repairs. It saved them from having to pay whichever company was doing their warranty service calls that week for a house call.
I rarely was called upon to fix Acer or Asus machines, which may or may not mean anything because of their relatively low market share. But I did own an Acer laptop for a while and it was a very good machine.
All that being said, all the manufacturers have tops and bottoms to their lines, and I usually bought at or near the tops, whether for myself or on behalf of clients. At the top, pretty much all the machines will be decent. They're pretty much commoditized. I leaned toward the brands that caused me the least grief when things did go wrong, which were HP and Dell. They were both good about honoring warranty claims and shipping parts directly to me, despite my not being any sort of "authorized" service company.
Sony, on the other hand, was the worst. They insisted that their machines be shipped to California for repairs, no matter how minor the problem, with turnaround averaging from two to four weeks. I remember one time when they wouldn't even ship me a PCI NIC to swap into one of their desktop machines to replace a failed one. They also told me that if I replaced the NIC from my inventory they would void the warranty on the machine for breaking the seal. The customer had just lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks a few days before, but even that didn't sway them. It was either ship the machine to California or void the warranty. The customer didn't have another computer, so she chose to void the warranty. I haven't purchased anything from Sony since.
The other thing to consider on any laptop purchase is that they tend to be a pain in the ass to repair and upgrade, so I used to advise clients to lean toward the higher-end machines and to purchase something that should meet their needs for five years from the time of purchase. With desktop machines, I was more concerned with what upgrades the machines could
support, if needed, than with their stock configurations.
Rich
