Compaq 4 years ago 9 of 10 today 5 of 10.
There armada series notebooks were very up to date and well designed/built. Their parts were easy to come by. I still have a 7400 P2 300 that just keeps banging away. Ive had to put one hard drive in it and replace a screen my daughter broke. It has been dropped numerous times, once being from 4 feet off the ground onto concrete (luckily it landed flat on not on a corner
) Their support site was easy to navigate and i could get part number and compatabilty info quick and easy. Today, im affraid to even pick one up with one hand becasue they "flex" soo much. People i know with them have nothing but problems, and since hp took over, their site support blows too.
Toshiba 10 of 10 While the A60 i bought my wife feels flimsy, it performs very well. The restore cd allows for partition sizing so i can dual boot easily. The battery failed prematurly, but we received a new one in two days. The screen looks good, after a year the hinges are still tight. It's a DTR so it gets used every day for several hours. While the fan is a bit noisy, its capable of cooling the prescott we have in it well enough that even rendering video or folding (see our folding @ home forum), i dont need to worry about being branded when using it on my lap.
Since being pretty happy with Toshiba, I bought myself a tecra M2. It came with 512 mb of ram. unlike other companies, they used a single stick of 512 and not 2x256. So when i threw a gig in it, i ended up with 1.5 gigs of ram instead of 1.25 and a stick that was useless. Even though the lappy is fairly small, The keyboard is not bad to use and it came with a mouse pad AND pointer (that sucker comes in handy for driving/clicking). I have not had an issue with this lappy yet, so i have no first hand experience with toshiba support. The site was easy to navigate though, and made researching the lappy i wanted was a snap. For example, while i needed proc type, battery life, weight, etc, i also needed to know if they had a model with a magesium chasis or hybrid magnesium/ plastic (which this one is) or just plastic.
Nearly half of my wife's coworkers have toshiba's (about 25% dells and the other 25% hp's) The Toshiba reps help them with incentives. But its the after purchase thats worth mentioning. They are using everything from the budget models up to the Qosmio. Other than a few battery issues (my wife was one of them) and one bad keyboard, oh and a failed hard drive, they have all been pretty happy (or at least lying to me well)
Dell gets a 7 of 10
I havent owned one of these myself, but i get to fix a few of them, and have friends that have them. Their design is not bad, They seem to perform ok, except i dont like the way they low ball their prices and offer so little. Finding info on their website blows big time. I wasted a lot of time needlessly there. While they are good at answering the phones, their support is quite lacking for anything involving more knowledge than swapping out the battery :/. while this would not prevent me from buying one, it does decrease the chances enough where i probably won't.
IBM 9 of 10
Their laptops are legendary in terms of performance and durability but their price reflects this. Parts are easy to get and finding info is not bad. ergonomically they look like chevy truck of the 70's and 80's which while it gives them a sense of familiarity, they also look quite dated. This is not a bad thing really more of an observation ( I still own three of those old chevy trucks) I may well buy an IBM in the future.
Gateway shares the 5 of 10 rating for compaq for much of the same reasons excluding the fact that i can never really consider a time when they were preferable.
Sony 7 of 10
All i can say as of the last year or so is :/ Their P3's were wonderful, then about the time they started making P4's, it seemed they couldn't make a motherboard last anymore. They really feel solid and can survive abuse, but motherboard failure is too high from what I've seen. Some better quality control is in order before they ruin their good rep.