I have a Thinkpad T510 that replaced a 4 year old T60 last year. I sold the T60 for $200 to one of my friends and it's still running.
I will never buy an HP and a Sony again. I had a Sony several years ago that had a buggy BIOS that automatically loaded failsafe values every few days, which would disable USB 2 and drop the RAM speed to 266MHz. It affected several VAIO desktops based on the same motherboard and Sony never fixed it.
I had an HP that had the hard drive controller crap out after about 15 months. It was fine when I left the house, came back a few hours later and it was frozen solid and wouldn't boot again. He also use HP's at work and we consistently get laptop models that are just plain junk. They will either have motherboard faults or will be built with the thinnest, junkiest plastic HP can get their hands on.
I have no idea why the person above said to never buy Lenovo "crap", but they consistently beat out every other PC manufacturer in customer satisfaction and support ratings and I've never had a problem with any of my Thinkpads, IBM or Lenovo.
