i will vouch for dell.. ive had my dell laptop (inspiron 8500) for 5 years now and never had a single problem with it until 2 weeks ago when the backlight on the monitor went out, that will be fixed soon though. but ive put it through hell, its had billiards balls bounced off the case, even survived an 80mph roll over in which it went out the window and landed on the median of I-95, worked fine after that too

i also built my home desktop and yea thats much more powerful than my laptop could ever hope to be and only cost me $400 in parts plus a $200 LCD monitor