Well, Alienware makes a very fast and nice looking laptop. Up to 3gh Pentium4, 512 meg Ram, and a Radeon 9000 graphics chip. Cost a whole bunch though.
RE notebooks I’ve owned IBM Thinkpads, Sony Vaio’s, Compaq Presarios and Armadas, Toshiba Satellites and Dells in addition to some second tier brands like Winbook. I have also been inside most of them.
IBM Thinkpad’s are the highest quality and best built notebooks internally and generally have the most advanced engineering, but are somewhat pricey. If reliability is key they are the best notebook overall. IBM service is untouchable and is on a tier above all the others.
Sony Vaio’s are sleek, sophisticated units and have some nice (and sometimes unique) multi-media features built in, but unless you need these features they are also quite pricey, and are not quite as rugged or reliable as the Thinkpads. Parts can be considerably more difficult to get for Sonys if the unit is more than year or two old.
Compaq Presarios, Toshiba Satellites and HP Pavilions and Dells are more or less on the same quality tier and are the value leaders with excellent feature sets for the dollar. The Satellites are probably a bit more rugged overall the the others, but Toshiba service and online help is not as accessible or extensive and parts are not as accessible for older machines vs the other manufs. Compaq and Dell have the best and most accessible and comprehensive service in this value tier. I’ve dealt with service issues on all of them and the Compaqs are no better or worse overall than the others in this tier reliability wise. FWIW the lower priced Presarios being sold in the last few months are essentially HP Pavilions
One problem all the manufs have (and Compaq especially) is the tendency to loading up their machines with tons of resource sucking background applets out of the box most of which are of dubious utility. Once these have been removed an/or defeated performance is very acceptable. .