Hi, This will probably be answerable by few because these darn things are so amazingly expensive but... What''s a good notebook in terms of LCD quality, battery life, performance, portability and value? What''s it going to be used for, I hear you ask? Well, I plan to use it for mobile programming, playing old games (pre-3D days), reading pdf, word, xls type documents, and listening to mp3s. Any suggestions?

I agree Stoffel! CTX is a company that should have been obliverated years ago given their crud equipment. We''ve got Dell desktops at college and they suck! They''re pretty stable, but do anything fancy like turn on Font Smoothing in Win 98 and they will only do it in the Display Properties preview window. -shrug- On top of that, they were outdated the day they were ordered. I can''t say anything about the notebooks, but they''re supposed to be good.
. NO Compaqs. NO CTX. No Kaypro. NO Packard Bell. Compaqs run, but are a %!%$* with peripherals. Want to use a printer? Turn off the computer, plug it in, turn it back on. Want to use the CD-ROM drive? Turn it off, take out the floppy drive, put in the CD-ROM drive, turn it back on. You get the idea.
. Personally I like Toshiba. Not the greatest, but the CD-ROM drive reads CD-Rs and CD-RWs and has a nice spindle that grips the inside ring. You can plug just about anything in while it''s running and it won''t flinch. And both the floppy and CD-ROM drives are in the side [one above the other thanks to a slim design.] The batteries run pretty good [2 to 2 1/2 hrs], just don''t overcharge them EVER. The life goes down by about half an hour and you''ll get overestimates of battery time left.
. Sonys are very nice, especially the VAIOs, but are pricy. I don''t know about other brands, so check around for some reviews. Try ZDnet or Cnet.

There is nothing wrong with Dell notebooks. I have bought several for the company that I work for, and have had very few problems with them. We have about 200 on hand right now.
Our laptop user base is comprised of complete morons, and even they don''t break/screw up very many of them.

Dell''s customer support does suck though. It is MUCH easier for us to just take care of the problem ourselves rather than attempt to get them to fix anything.

Toshibas and Sonys are very nice as well. I can''t buy them because of some unsolved compatability problem with some of our older DOS apps/utilities that we use around here, but if it weren''t for that I would buy them.

SiCrane,

You are the first person that I have ever heard praise Gateway support.

I got a Dell Latitude CPt in August and I like the product a lot. You can swap the cd-rom and floppy drives out without rebooting and you can add the floppy via parallel port dongle without rebooting. It has a 14.1 inch screen (which 1024x768 shows up real nice). My only gripe about it was that the graphics subsystem didn''t accelerate 3D. Oh, and another gripe: the system gets hot quickly. An example: I am playing a 3D game (Jump on the ''net, Mechwarrior demo) and the fan suddenly starts. I have less than 30 seconds to quit the app before my laptop shuts down!
Another example: I had to write a program for one of my classes a while back--a real number cruncher--, I had to use an ice block for the program to complete its task. So, to sum things up:

1. Make sure that the system won''t get too hot frequently.
   
2. Make sure that if you''re going to do programming (of the game variety), then it''d better have a 3D accelerated graphics subsystem.
   
   JoeG
   

Heh, from what I''ve read on the Net, and yes, I did do my research before posting, the Apple Powerbooks (not iBook) is probably the best notebook on the market at the moment in terms of LCD quality, support, battery life, performance, price and anything else. My problem is the fact taht I want to do Windows based programming, so I''m stuck with a Wintel notebook. I came here because most of the opinions I''ve seen on notebooks are pretty dire, though some are good (see the the person who thought Gateway support was good above). It appears the best are the Sony Vaio (505 series, the Superslim brand) and Dell''s Inspiron brand. I guess it''s just a matter of buy and hope for luck.

Unfortunately, being in Australia, Sony don''t sell Vaio''s here, so my options are pretty much Toshiba, Gateway, Dell, IBM, and Acer, with Toshiba with the most market penetration. Problem is when I start leaning towards something, I read something that makes me change my mind. It''s a lot of money and I don''t want a dud purchase.

One word: Argh!