i'm not sure which is a good make, but avoid MEDION/MICROSTAR, i had a microstar laptop a couple of years ago and it has been nothing but trouble, it claimed to have a 30gb Hard drive, although only 15 of that was teh C:/ drive, and the rest was for a restore program, the battery and modem stopped working after about 12 month (but the modem was a great excuse to upgrade to broadband) and it has a P4 2.6ghz processor, but is far slower than my windows 98 pc with just a 450mhz pentium 3!