Darn tootin’, pardner. My work T40 has shrugged off two years of use. My old knockabout T20 has lasted three years in an office and another one at home. A friend of mine is using a 600X that has had five years of hard use. The only way I have seen of killing them is to drop them hard, carry them around by the screen or pour coffee/soda in the keyboard. The removable floppy/optical drives die quite often but that is normally because people brutalize them.
another happy thinkpad owner chiming in
i have rather specific laptop needs. a floopy drive and a parallel port are essential for my work applications.
i have an old trusty and reliable 770 that i use every day.
i just bought a certified used thinkpad a31p from ibm’s website for under 700, equipped exactly the way i wanted it.
here is a link to that page.
If all you’re going to do is surf the net then buy the cheapest laptop with a wireless connection and (a keyboard you like) and if possible get XP Professional installed (more stable than XP).
If you are going to work with photographs then order as much memory on a single chip because most laptops only have 1 additional memory slot. I’ve got 2 gb’s of RAM on my laptop and I wish I had more for photographic work (I use my laptop mainly for scanning photo’s on the road).
Laptops are also one of the few products where a warranty is of any use. I replaced a battery and eventually the laptop under warranty. It was a cash exchange toward a new laptop (Best Buy). They also relinquished the old hard drive which I was able to turn into an external USB drive using a $20 kit. Saved my a lot of hassle trying to fish out the old files.
One thing I liked with my new laptop (Compaq) is that it will run on AC without the battery plugged in. This is a great feature which I hope is found on all new laptops.
Other thoughts. If you use your laptop to watch movies (on the go) then get the higher resolution screen.
Happy hunting.