Nobody's gonna take this one hey? C'mon...somebody' gotta have some good info. If not, anyone know of a link with comparisons?
OK, I will bite. We are looking for a new laptop as well and want to stay around the $1000 range. I am looking for more feedback on the IBM>Lenovo change, or lack thereof. My sister bought a new Lenovo, but she still thinks AOL is the internet so I cannot trust her opinions on laptop hardware.
First off what style of laptop are you looking for? I would say that there are three: desktop replacement, mid-weight, and ultra compact. You can get most if not all of the features that you are looking for in all three. Just keep in mind that the smaller and lighter it gets, the more it will cost and harder to keep around a grand.
Here are my personal experiences. Don't hold me to anything I say...please.
I regularly use two different ones.
A Sony Vaio PCG-K13 which is an inexpensive desktop replacement. I think that we eneded up paying about $1350 for this 2-3 years ago. It weighs about 9+ pounds and now its crappy battery only last for about 90-120 minutes. The display is beautiful. (Come on it is Sony) The CPU is a p4 2.8ghz which is a power hog and runs hot. Not the best combo for a laptop. The bad thing about the Sony is they pre-load it with every friggin' unecessary multimedia program that you would never use.
It has not had really any mechanical problems other than a user error or two.
Summary, heavy, hot and slow, but has a nice disply and an egronomic touchpad.
The 2nd one I use is a Dell 700m which is the ultra light class. 4.1 pounds with it's standard battery, but I added a 8-cell battery which pushes the power into the 5 hour range. The trade off is another pound+ in battery weight. This is most certainly NOT a desktop replacement since it has about 10 mini keys on its keyboard. A lot of these are the punctution keys in the lower right of a standard keyboard and makes word processing difficult. These gernerally are much more power efficient and because of this use smaller Pentium M processors up to 2.0ghz. I think that mine is 1.6 or 1.7 and I added the internal intel wireless for centrino. Its main use is for presentations, but doubles at night from time to time as a high-resolution recorder. A tricked out 700m (which is being phased out with the 710m) can easily knock you up into the $1500 range, but Dell does end of hte quarter deals often and I nailed a loaded one down for about $750 + about $100 in upgrades to the door. This one has had mechanical problems. One month after receiving it the motherboard would not POST without rebooting 40 or 50 times. I sent it in and got a brand new mobo replaced and back in action within 3 days. The turn around from CA>TN>CA absolutely floored me. It was just difficult to get "Mike" from India to understand what I needed. Then one week after its warranty ran out it randomly locked up. I went to the Dell site downloaded every driver and BIOS for it that had ever been released and proceeded to do a complete C: re-format to remove whatever magical conflicts the garbage programs were having. Only Wavelab, MS Office, and Symantec Corp on it now
Summary: small, light, cheap, some hardware problems that were easily fixed.
Odd thing is that I was told to STAY AWAY from the new Sony's. Not sure why. I would be interested in other's feedback on what they use too.