Buying a laptop (educate me)

[dirmaster0]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop as well, owned it for 3-4 years now and its still running fine. i3 w/ 8GB RAM & 500GB HD. I also work on computers for a living, and the Satellite series is probably the line we see the least (which is good, they're a pretty solid line of laptops that can take a fair amount of abuse). I would caution you to stay away from the HP Pavilion line of laptops, and the Gateway NV series as well.

For a run of the mill laptop, I would suggest getting an i5-i7 CPU with ~8GB RAM, 500-1TB HD w/ Windows 7/8. We sell a fair amount of the Dell Inspiron line of laptops at work, but I would still go for a Toshiba Satellite model. Good luck!