^funny, because I use an HP (desktop, but still). No problems so far. only nitpick is that the pop-up screen that comes up when you insert disk/similar things doesn't work, but I don't use it much anyways, so it isn't exactly a problem. (having XP).
And sorry, but can't help otherwise, I'm not expert on laptops.
Um, you can't really judge the quality of a company's notebook computers by looking at their desktops. In fact, the problem with HP notebooks is that they basically ARE desktops, just with all of the components crammed into a smaller box. I bought a dv9000t 17-inch HP notebook as a desktop replacement (I wanted something that I could take with me on airplanes) and the motherboard died several months after the warranty expired. What caused this hardware failure? The fact that I was clocking both of my processor's cores at 2.0 GHz, which is the rate that they're supposed to clock. I had to pay ~$300 to have HP fix a problem solved by their design flaw. I found out later that owners of the dv9000z who had the same problem got this problem fixed by HP for free, as it was a design flaw that caused a lot of power users' machines to die, but because my machine was powered by an Intel chip (rather than an AMD), I had to pay.
Anyway, advice for OP:
My recommendation is to buy a laptop with a minimalist memory configuration and then just add more memory after buying it. When I bought my laptop, getting it with 2 GB RAM would have cost me something like $150, so instead I bought it configured with 512 MB RAM and bought a 1 GB stick for $50. That was two years ago. Last summer I bought a 2 GB stick for $30. Depending on your memory's clock speed, you might end up paying more, but when it comes to memory, after-market upgrades are the way to go.
Similar case for laptop hard drives. I just saw a
640 GB laptop hard drive on Newegg that is selling for $120. Buying a laptop with a puny hard drive and then replacing it with something like that would probably be more economical than buying something with a larger pre-installed hard drive. Several other things to consider when it comes to hard drives: default for laptop hard drives is 5400 RPM. They do also make 7200 RPM laptop hard drives, but these tend to be more expensive and they also shorten your battery life. However, they do offer a performance increase. On the far end of the performance spectrum, you have solid state drives, which are considerably more expensive and offer less storage. If you use a solid state drive, you'll probably want a separate external drive for storing your media. Instead of buying an "external hard drive," just get the drive and enclosure separately. $90 desktop 1 TB hard drive + $20 external enclosure = massive storage for a reasonably low price.
