HP, eeeewwww. When I worked at Worst Buy we had about 10-15 machines on display and the HP's routinely froze, several times a day, and they all weren't running the same OS either.
While they are rather expensive for what you get, a thinkpad is def one of my favorites.
One thing that I will say after working in retail for awhile is that no matter what brand of machine you are looking at, someone had a lemon and will ***** about it all day long. With that being said out of the 3 brands I sell I would go with a Toshiba 1st, Compaq 2nd and HP 3rd.
cnet has some reviews of machines, out of which the IBM thinkpad a series just got an editors choice. you might want to look and see what they say about other stuff
Cnet .
Another option you might want to consider is this: For about $350 you can get a palm pilot and a folding full size keyboard, if you are primarialy bringing the computer to school for note-taking this is something you might want to consider, and than just keeping the machine you have now for a little longer.
oh and one last thing, Dell's products often do well, you might want to head over to their site and price one out.
-Pete
