There is only one brand of laptop that you will get worldwide support in the event of a failure, and that's Compaq.
We've got 12,500 of them and at most I've only ever seen 3 in the repair bay (usually dropped). Not the cheapest, but if you want cheap you get what you pay for. I could go [virtually] anywhere in the world and get my laptop fixed for free under warrenty. You can't get that with Dell, IBM, Toshiba or HP.