Protip: Avoid HP. Their batteries are stuff, the quicklaunch buttons have a stuffty driver that gets overwritten with every windows update and you need to reinstall it and the Pavilion brand has a problem with its sound. You can turn off the laptop and the next day it boots soundless for no apparent reason.
Yeah, I have to agree that HP is terrible.
My family have had 4 different models of HP laptops, and each and every one has had issues with the battery breaking, or even more common, the socket for the laptop charger comes loose, and the charger will no longer plug in properly, usually won't charge unless it's held in a certain orientation, or won't charge at all.
On occasion the HP laptop charger itself has also broken, and an official HP replacement has too, whereas a 3rd party one was much better.
Toshiba laptops however have been significantly better. We've only had 2, but the first one (my first laptop, which I won in a writing competition!), lasted for 6 years, despite having been bashed and battered. It's battery did break after a few years, but the charger kept on. And the hardware was still reasonably decent. We had to factory reset it several times though, due to it completely crashing and becoming unusable. I believe that was probably more a result of Vista however, or poor care with downloading stuff (my mother used the laptop for 4 of it's 6 years).
