I get asked this question a lot. Everyone wants to know which brand of laptop to buy. People think about their laptop brands like they think about automobile manufacturers or something like that. Laptop quality differences among manufacturers is not quite the same as construction quality among car manufacturers. With computer manufacturing there are many similarities across brands. For instance, some of the parts are modular. Some components like the hard drives are purchased from hard drive manufacturers. Therefore you could have the same brand of hard drive installed into many different brands of laptop computers.
Over the last few years the quality levels of the laptop construction among major manufacturers has gotten pretty close. There is no longer a major quality difference among the major manufacturers. There are a couple of exceptions to the rule. Let me explain further.
If I was to choose a brand of laptop to purchase for my own use, I would shop more for features than for brand. Of the major brands of laptops out there I would not hesitate to purchase any of the brands listed below.
Quality Laptop Brands:
Hewlett Packard
Compaq – Hp now owns Compaq computer for those who didn’t know that.
Dell
Sony
IBM – Lenovo
Toshiba
Panasonic
Gateway – I know they had a bad name in their desktop PC line a few years back, but they do build quality laptops.
Major Brand I Cannot Comment On = Samsung – Their laptops have not been as popular over the years. In fact I am not really sure when they got into the laptop business. I cannot comment on them other than to say that Samsung does make excellent LCD screens. I am sorry but you will have to look for reviews elsewhere on Samsung laptops.
Manufacturers I am not a fan of:
Acer
eMachines
ASUS
MSI
No-name brands or store branded laptops
I do not like to bash brands. So let me just say that I have had quality concerns with each of these brands at various times for one reason or another. Therefore I do not recommend any of these brands to my friends. I especially insist that they not purchase any custom built store brand laptops.
No-name brands and store brands were really popular a few years ago. A lot of them would come into the repair shop with bad motherboards. They would have all kinds of weird problems that were obviously due to low quality manufacturing standards. Many of them were total lemons. These cheap laptops were not very old and had all kinds of problems that they should not have had. That is the risk you take when you buy a brand that you have never heard of or when you buy a brand that sells mainly bottom priced laptops.
I don’t know about you, but if I am spending $500 or more on something, I want it to last more than a couple years without any major hardware failure.