IBM/Lenovo thinkpads. Titanium cases, sensing hard drives to sudden movement that locks the drive and parks the heads, online recovery if you can get a network connection, list goes on and on. When you order 1 gig they give you 1 stick so you can easily upgrade to 2 gigs, not like the others that put 2 sticks in and in order to upgrade you need to replace BOTH. I won't even go into the ac/dc converter failures on HP, Sony, compaq and dell.
The only other one I would consider would be Acer, mainly because I like the AMD turons and again they max them out for a good price. The only shortcomings I've come across is the speaker volume is low and that the optical drive is not a slide out which makes replacement a PIA. The IBM's use a slide out drive thats easy to replace though a bit pricey.
For my self, IBM, it's what I bought my daughter and me this year. One other thing, video card, you want a dedicated video card with it's own memory, not shared and you want good resolution, better then 1024x768. We have T43's with intel video shared memory but I needed a real serial port for connecting to cisco hardware and SAN arrays. The thinkpads all come with 802.11 a/b/g wireless which is nice as alot of companys who got into wireless early run 'a'.
The R60 with ATI video with 64meg is a good deal though I would upgrade to 2 gig, if you go vista you will need it and if you go XP I would only go with XP pro.
Also all the IBM's are linux drop in's, suse, redhat, etc, it goes right in, no driver issues it just works. Now if Sun would just get off their asses and start supplying network drivers I'd be all set and able to run solaris.
