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?

I have had bad experience with compaq, and so have other people. Even though they were bought out by HP, they are still very low quality. If you are going to spend $1000+, I would suggest a Toshiba if you want it to last one. They are a little more expensive, but they are very well built. Ive had a few and all have worked great. You should also check out Dell, they are very cheap and the quality is alright. Both companies' laptops should last at least a few years if you dont abuse them.

-C

I always like the Sonys

IBM is the best in the business, hands down.

Dell, Acer and Toshiba if you can't fork out the money for an IBM notebook.

IBM laptops are great, I had one and I loved it. They are very stable and they are pretty sleek looking.

-C

I have used a few, and I think that acer is the best sort for all these new laptops

if you will use it for working/desktop machine, but if you are gonna use it for playing

games that takes alot of CPU then I suggest you take sony vaio or something like that.

It's better that you use normal computers for gaming I think.

Regards, Blade1941.

Whatever you get, buy one with a light processor, like Celeron or Barton Mobile. There are some notebooks that battery doesn't last for more than 2 or 3 hours without needing a recharge! IMO, that's the first thing you should look on a laptop.