Best brand for notebook PC?

im gonna be starting college soon, and i was wondering which brand holds up the best. i dont plan on spending alot of money, less then a grand. so what brands are best and why? thanks,
Tashi

Toshibas are nice - decent quality, well built, pretty reliable. I've got well-used Toshibas kicking around at work that are six or seven years old and still work beautifully (if you don't mind Windows 98, of course). Get a Centrino (Pentium-M)-based system for the win (good for power consumption but still with plenty of CPU grunt).

i have an asus m5n which i like a lot. thats a little more than a grand, but there are some cheaper asus' that are worth a luck. very cheap for performance and the cases are beautiful.

HP has a couple new notebooks out that use the new AMD Turion64 chip.  Its the AMD version of the Pentium-M. It gets good battery life and has more than enough processing power.

A Pentium M chip would work, but they often are a bit more expensive than other laptop chips.

You do not want a Celeron M though. Some try to push it off as a Pentium M with less cache, but it lacks the power management features of the Pentium M.

And there is no such thing as a centrino based system.  Centrino is a combination of several low power technologies. The system base is pentium m.  It only has centrino technology with a supporting low power graphics chip and wireless card. Pentuim M and Centrino are not interchangeable terms. Pentium M = processor base, Centrino = battery saving technology. Just wanted to clairify that, I see too many people praising thier "Centrino" processor to let this by.

>>4
Bzzzt! Centrino is not simply a "battery-saving technology". Centrino is a set of chips that *includes* the Pentium-M processor, and also the Intel 855 or Mobile 915 chipset and one or other of Intel's wireless LAN chips. These chips are designed for low power consumption and heat production, so are ideally suited to laptops. All Centrino-branded laptops by definition have the Pentium-M processor.

I think what >>4 is trying to say is that people are refering to Centrino as a processor. I see it myself all the time.  It is true that it is a collection of chips, but its fundamental goal is that of saving battery life. And you can get a Pentium M system that is not Centrino. Its one of those a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isnt a square things. Works one way, but not the other.