Recommend me a laptop

I'm a bit afraid of buying laptops now. The reason is that my laptop and my mom's laptop both have experience bad things after the 1 year warranty laptops were up. My laptop is a Compaq Presario 2500. Before it's one year warranty was up the AC power jack was loose, so that when I plugged the adapter, it barely got any power. I called the company and they were suppose to send something to send my laptop in, but that never happened. I got it fixed at a computer shop last year. This year I moved to another city and the hard drive went out and the power jack became loose again. Good thing is I got the hard drive replace, bad thing is that I can find no one to fix the power jack because they are afraid of the motherboard getting fried.

My mom's laptop(forgot the name of it) power jack is loose as well and now the hard drive is going out.

Can anyone recommend me a good basic laptop that can most likely last a couple of years?