If I were buying, I would be looking at Compaq, Dell, and IBM/Lenovo on the basis of experience.
My wife still uses the eight years old Compaq Armada E500 that is my old company laptop, purchased for a forty quid donation to charity five years ago and still in daily use. Its life is drawing to a close though as one bank of memory (it has 2x256MB) dropped off line a few weeks ago so the disk is currently constantly thrashing away as the remaining bank aint enough to load even the XP operating system ;-) The laptop will be replaced with a new one for my wife and then refurbished and rebuilt as a Linux single user FTP server simply for the fun of it and to serve a casual need.
By pure coincidence, I am today disposing of an eleven year old Dell Inspiron! Still in perfect working order we simply have no need for it any more and it's just not worth upgrading. It spent four of the past five years running 24x7 as a printer server on the home wireless network until I purchased a Canon MP800R WiFi printer.
From the build and features point of view though, by far the two most impressive laptops I have owned have been an IBM T42 and its replacement Lenovo T61. Superbly well made, they have both proven to have top drawer reliability and to be functionally impressive.
So, what will I replace my wife's Compaq Armada with, then?
On the basis of the above experience and what I have found on the web, it will be a Dell
Vostro. Remarkably low priced, I can get one that meets my wife's needs (e-mail, web browsing, photo and video handling) without needing a load of spec she'll never need and probably with usual Dell reliability. Oh, it can come with XP loaded, too. :-)