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Originally Posted by jorsoft03  I was going to say Compaq, that's probably the best choice for this type of price range. I'd take one over a Dell any day. |
I'd recommend just the opposite. I had a Compaq Presario budget laptop for nearly two years. So far:
1) its DVD drive stops working randomly
2) its battery died (which is to be expected for any laptop)
3) the hinges on both side of the screen have snapped
It was a decent enough laptop, but it wasn't very durable.
I just got a Dell Vostro 1400 and love the build quality on it. Although they don't sell the 1400 anymore, they do have others. The Vostro is their business series, so it's not as glamorous as the Inspirons, but it still looks pretty nice and seems very solidly built and is usually less expensive than their Inspiron counterpart.
You can get a Vostro 1000 with an AMD (think slower yet still plenty usable) dual core processor, 120gb hard drive, 2gb RAM, and Vista Home Premium for about $520 without tax. It wouldn't be the fastest at games or very intense programs, but it'd be fine for surfing the web and IMing -- my single-core laptop is slower yet worked perfectly fine for that.
If you want something a little more powerful, the Vostro 1500 can come with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 120gb hard drive, 2gb RAM, and a relatively decent graphics chip for about $650. You can cut back on some stuff if you want to cut back the price. It'd be best if you were doing some gaming or something, but the graphics card can help the Vista interface too.
It really depends on what you want to do with it and personal preference. I've had surprisingly good luck with Dells - two very old computers and a PDA that I never had a single problem with.