I've had a sony, an HP, a gateway, lets see... a toshiba, and now an acer. The gateway and sony both had screens go out (the sony was high dollar). Cost too much to fix. The HP had an issue wiith where the cord plugged in. Again too much to fix, not worth it. The toshiba and acer are fairly recent. The toshiba went out, sorta my fault. It got accidentially turned off when the BIOS was updating so it wouldn't turn back on. Toshiba support was excellent, although they were all foreigners I spoke to. They paid to have it shipped back via UPS Store and got it back in a week. Not bad. The acer is the newest. I bought it because the toshiba had to be sent off for a week and I NEED a laptop. So I bought it at circuit city for under $600. Pentium, 2GB Ram, vista, etc. Everything you need. Its better than the toshiba in my opinion. The toshiba was $898 at walmart, but has an AMD processor. The pentium is faster. For the price this acer can't be beat. If money were no object and I hadn't invested in two fairly new laptops I would go with an apple. I am not real excited about vista. Its not bad, but I am tired of the updates and microsoft in general. Windows XP was more simple in my opinion and didn't have as many bugs. Plus with apple you can do a lot more in the way of video editing, etc. Its just the hipper, cooler laptop daddy-O. : )
Bottomline: I like my acer even with vista, can't beat it for the price!
That poll at the top is a little misleading. Best meaning price no object? Apple would win hands down. Should say, "best laptop value."