Daughter (in college) needs a new laptop. Her Toshiba Satellite Pro has been nothing but problems and I am tired of throwing money into it to fix. Any decent brands out there? Anything to stay away from? We have always used PC based. Is MAC a good alternative without breaking the bank?

Work provided me with a Dell D610 that's been virtually indestructable. Now that it's LONG out of warranty, the battery started going, so they sent me the replacement model, the Dell D630 (Latitude). Seems just as good. I travelled a lot, and my laptops get used hard. I'm impressed.

Recommended the same model to my niece, she hasn't had any issues with hers either.

My .00000002 (adjusted for inflation). :D

My employer issued all of us in the field Panasonic Toughbooks.
They are expensive but I haven't heard of anyone having an issue with them in the year or so we've had them.

Good luck!

What Buick Greg said. We used numerous Panasonic Toughbooks in Iraq late 03-late 04. Hi Temps, tons of dust, etc.....no issues at all with failure.

My personal Dell XPS M-140 is coming up on three years. The only fault was a waranty replacement of the wall to computer power cord/converter

Dang, those Panasonic toughbooks are pricey!

I repair laptops for a living, the Panasonic Toughbooks would be one of the most rock solid units available, but like you said you pay for it. Personally these days I'm really fond of HP's line of business laptops, well built and reliable. Really any business grade laptop with a good warranty should be sufficient, the consumer grade laptops these days such as your Toshiba Satellite have had so many corners cut to save costs due to competition that they rarely last more than a year.

Troy,
Daughter is looking at Mac now. What is your opinion of those for reliability?
For work, I have an IBM Lenova T61 that seems to hold up well.

Macs are damn reliable.

We have 4 laptops, a 7 yr old Powerbook, a newer alum Powerbook, a MacBook, and my MacBook Pro that we've added to our collection of 2 iMacs, 2 eMacs, and an Apple II GS.

They just upgraded the hardware and lowered the prices on nearly the whole Mac laptop line too. http://www.apple.com/macbook/

If you want some shopping help or some exp. to cut through all the clutter, PM me.

I disagree about macs. At the agency I work for, the power supplies seem to drop like flies. When don't have a lot of macs out there though. I'd say, that we had maybe 10, and now we are down to 2 of them because the rest died and we didn't want to fix them, we simply replaced them with Dells.

Laptops, The Dell Latitude 610 is a older model, but it is a workhorse and reliable.

Alienware makes excellent laptops. If you want a top of the line go with them, but it'll cost you.

CyberPowerPC has good laptops as well.
Samsung(i think that is them), is now selling their laptops in the US and they are good.

I think right now at best buy they have an ACER Laptop going for 399.99 or something, and from the reveiws on CNET, it is good bang for the buck and has the latest wireless protocol.

When you get a new laptop, it will probably have Vista on it. If you aren't going to reload it with xp, make sure you get atleast 2 GB of ram so you aren't dissapointed with performance. Make sure the wireless is the most recent available so you can take advantage of the speed.

Big D

Check the sales on sunday and start reading consumer reviews on the models. HP has been good to me. Unfortunately they will probably have Vista on them.

Tim