I've always used Toshiba in my life.
My first one was 788 Mhz CPU, 333 mb RAM, 4Gb hard and it performed WAY better than other laptops that were 3X my specs.
For the past 4 years I've been living in the college's dormitory (dorm) so I've seen pretty much enough of every laptop.
I don't like ACERs. At all. My mom has one and I don't like it as well. They overheat so damn much. A LOT. For 30mins of skype/browsing it heats more than hours of my current toshiba on high CPU/RAM usage.
Sony are as good as other laptops, but are one or two ideas more expensive. My roommate's Sony has EXACTLY THE SAME specs but costed 200$ more. I've been called to fix several SONYs in the dorm.
HPs, at least in my country are good, but expensive and the support is more expensive as well. I just fixed a HP that got bugged somehow and was freezing every 10 mins.
So far in the dorm I've had my current Toshiba for 2 years and apart from the regular Windows re-installs every 6 months or so, I haven't experienced any trouble at all. I've massacred my laptop to the extremes. I currently have 2gigs of RAM and usually I'm going with Mozilla with about 20 tabs (Elements being flash as well as youtube and other games) going at times to 1gig RAM consumption, Winamp with all my music, skype chats, and some game that is frequently being alt-tabbed. (Used to run WoW with a two-dozen add-ons on windowed mode) and the PC performs with no problems.
The problem is that you have to look carefully at the specs. My laptop was not chosen by me (I got it accidentally) so it has an Intel integrated video card (I so wanna throw out my PC because of that) so forget about any 3D-accelerated wanting games, high pixel shader games and vertex wanting games. Intel cards just CAN'T play games, no matter being 4gbs of RAM (one of my roommates had such Intel and it SUCKED BIG TIME).
!!!!!Chose ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce!!!!!
Bloodrayne - Not working
NFS:MW - gotta lower the details, and still lags on very high speeds where the screen blurs.
WCIII - No problems
WoW:WOTLK - lowest details possible and still lags at capitals
Crysis - keep dreaming about that
Assasin's Creed: Second that
And all that just because of the video card.....
Overall, I support Toshiba with all my heart. This PC has never failed me for the 2 years of usage. Yes, it is a bit old but it serves me good and even though I abuse him beyond reasonable limits from time to time it gives me trouble once a month or even less (when I forget to shut it down for a week or something like that)
