Laptops suck.

Thanks for all the info!

I have to say I have very bad experiences with Acer machines so I vowed to never buy one again.

My Compaq laptops (mostly on the more high end spectrum) have always performed rather well apart from always breaking down after 2 years. I've always bought upto 3 years of garantee, next business day on site and I have to say that garantee issues are handled very well by Compaq.

Thinking about the HP 8530 p/w now. But it's a hard choice between the HP and the braillenote. After all the braillenote is a lot smaller and lighter than the HP.

HP has horrible tech support even with extended warranty. The University here had a contract for HP laptops and they broke it so many tiime, it were canceled. It is now either Dell or Toshiba. At least they fix things while with HP, sometimes we had to wait up to 6 months for a repair. And this is with 24-hour on site contract.

here is some more statistics for you PP

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/app...lity,7364.html

Check out the table on Reliability. Asus & Lenovo on top (matches up well with the other survey i posted). Seems that HP is worse thatn Acer for reliability.

Why dont you give Asus a try out? Never had one myself, but these report seem favourable.

If small and light is what you want/need, get a netbook as well as a normal laptop. What do you want to use your computer for? Heavy stuff or standard office programs? I guess you want to play civ and other games as well, but you don't need to use the same computer for that. I would recommend against it.