Really? They consistently seem, in my experience, to have thew worst build quality, and parts die regularly. Ive never seen a single one that had a solid hinge on it after 6 months of use.
My last three laptops, going back to 2004 or so, have all been Toshiba. By and large I've been pleased with the quality and support on all of them. I'm typing this now on super-cheap, low-end Toshiba that I bought as an emergency replacement a year ago (I dropped my other one and busted the screen) and it has been fine. Well, as "fine" as you get when you're running Linux anyway. Almost everything "just worked" out of the box with the only big exception being suspend. If you try to suspend this machine, it bricks it (but you can unbrick it by taking the battery our for a couple of minutes). But hibernate works OK, so I get by with that. Still, for < $400.00 for a 17" widescreen, I'm not complaining.
> My last three laptops, going back to 2004 or so, have all been Toshiba.
My current laptop is a 2007 MacBook. Not the solid-looking Pro aluminum kind. The cheap-looking plastic kind. It still runs everyday, all day long, and gets roughly 7h of battery life (with a spare battery) when I run XCode 4 (with real-time compilation going on) all day.
I can't seem to recollect PCs coming even close to that. Do they nowadays, or is the fact that you bought three devices as if this was normal clouding your judgement?
For what it's worth, my current laptop is a 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad T60 that still runs perfectly. I've never had any problems with it, and I only upgraded the hard drive a few years back because I wanted more space. The extended battery gets about 8 hours, no spare needed. I can even play Dota 2 on it.
