[MovedGoalPosts]

For work we swear by anything Dell. My laptop for work gets used daily and my only business machine, and has been fine for 5 years, even after it's been dropped a few times. Only thing that went wrong was the external power supply thing.

For personal use I recently bought a Samsung Q430 which is i5 CPU based. It's great but it is also quite high spec. But I must say it get's quite warm. It will be interesting to see how well it does long term. But short term I'd certainly look at the Samsung brand again.

Bottom line you need to be thinking about how the laptop would be used: weight and size versus protability, storage capacity, screen size (real estate may be more important than graphics quality unless they are into photo or other media editing and not gaming), balance the CPU speed with memory, make sure it has "n" speed wireless, and perhaps look at battery duration especially if it's going to get mobile use.