Man, I've looked at a lot of posts in different forums, and they all have problems.
Dell has exploding batteries, and everyone jumps all over them, but I just caught a post with a picture of a blown up Mac Ibook where the battery is fried. Nice shrapnel hole and all.
It's a crap shoot; ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances.
From personal experience, I have an old (really old) IBM Thinkpad and it's built like a tank. Still quite useful for net browser and word processing, but it doesn't have USB or Cardbus, so it's pretty well obsolete.
If I was buying another one, I'd go for a mid speed used IBM, but that's just me. I'm not willing to spend much more than 250 for a laptop, but I have a bunch of full sized boxes to use for main computers.
Do some Google searches for the ones you're thinking of buying. I always put the name of the laptop followed by "problems" in the search field, and I get tons of hits.
