I'm just curious to hear what some of you people think is the best company to buy laptops from. Not so much for gaming, just everyday use.

I like Dell's XPS line - good relatively thin and light computers (for the 1530 and 1330), and reasonably powerful, while having some of the best customer support around.

DELL XPS series are good
Also SAGER Makes very good laptops(usually SAGER laptops has less problems thant other brands)

For regular needs, I would go with an HP dv6700t. My favorite series for the college goer, and better performing than Dell's offerings at sub $1000 levels.
Anything above $1k I would go for a gateway or a Sager - I prefer sager, though, considering I own one

I think I like Dell better than HP, but I've had more experience with Dell so.....

I agree with the Sager though

Just the reverse for me...only a few dells in this household, mostly HP's.

My last high end dell turned into a $2700 dollar paperweight which I salvaged for parts on ebay. Half of the ram went bad, immediately followed by the power connector on the motherboard failing. This was a month out of warranty and their outsourced tech support was more than willing to waste my time. I will never buy another one of their products, and gladly pay more for equal performance from almost any other brand. I now buy sub $500 dollar laptops... use them a year, sell them for 350, do the math on how much that saves you over losing 1500 a year in depreciation to play cutting edge games at a mediocre at best speed. Toshiba, Hp/Compaq/Sony, anything cheap and play good games that are a few years old if you HAVE to game on your laptop.