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1) I like IBM (built like a tank, but a little pricey), Dell (decent price and warranty), and Apple (nice machines).
2)Pentium M = same processing power as P4 but with lower clock rates and less power consumtion. A 1.4GHz Pentium is about a 2.8GHz P4 (I'm pretty sure on this but I could be wrong)
3) The combo drive on my 2 year old apple powerbook is still running like a champ and the dvd+rw on my brother's dell laptop is still going strong.
4) I have never bought many extras, except perhaps an extra battery and a case to carry it in.
When I helped my little brother pick out his laptop I tried to steer him to a few sure things (he got a dell inspiron 8600):
1) Pentium M processor
2) Decent amount of RAM 256 MB- 512 MB
3) Decent HD space ~30GB or more
Any laptop now will run the office apps fine, the games are a little different. A lot of the machines will come with crappy graphics cards. The two main game playing GPUs for laptops are ATi Radeon Mobilitys or GeForce2 Go, personally I prefer the ATi Radeon Mobility GPUs.
Another thing to consider is weight, screen size, and of course price.
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