Laptop Help

Some things I'd like to add:

- Toshiba seems to have poor-performance, poorly built laptops at their lower end, whereas their higher-end (and thus offered at a premium price) laptops are of high quality. I don't think Sony is as bad, but their budget models tend to have few features or simply modest performance.

- Few notebook brands offer as good laptop LCQ quality as Sony does. Apple perhaps.

- In general, Dell offer good service. At least, for corporations. I think they tend to be a bit quicker in handling service requests.

- 2 MB cache shouldn't be a dealbreaker. Cache used to make alot of difference, but its impact seems to be more marginal these days.

- No notebook is perfect. Every one has its strengths and weakness, and you will have to give up on the idea of having a perfect notebook (that even goes for the most expensive ones). As trite as it may sound, you need to pick based on what you deem is most important. If you want to keep options open for gaming, get the Dell. If screen quality is your thing, get the Sony. I don't think Dell has bad screens, by the way -- so perhaps Dell is your best choice.

- See if you can check the notebooks out in a store. You know the specs, but what about the LCD (brightness, vertical and horizontal view angles), build of the notebook (materials used, lcd hinges) and layout (usb ports, utp port, extra buttons etc)?

Jam it back in, in the dark.