Friend is buying a new laptop - looking at some by HP, ASUS and Acer. From my recollection, HP and ASUS are OK but Acer can be a bit dodgy. Is that still true? And are there any other brands that have a good rep?

What's the budget?

I have no idea. I don't think they want me to recommend a particular model, just want to know if there's a brand they should avoid.

My current and last laptop have been acers and ive had no problems with them that I havent caused myself

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Last one I recommended was a DELL from their "Outlet"

The cheapest models from any brand tend to be nasty, except for the more elite brands.

My suggestion for a budget brand... Medion

Aldi used to sell them but you can get them direct from their site, £480 + del on the current set will get you an i5 15.6" 1080p screen system with 4gb ram, blu ray and 750gb hdd, dedicated gpu. You can manually double the RAM for about £30

Thats the one I'm looking at anyway, after owning one for about 4 years now the only thing I've had to do is buy a new battery and one of the rubber domes on the keyboard has broken (but should be easy to reglue)

They don't look nice like Sony/Lenovo and aren't the lightest either, but they do the job well and are great VFM IMO (the closest spec system I found was an Asus laptop that was £120 more at nearly £600)

Medion tend to be loud, you need to be careful. They are very much built down to a price, usually dictated by Aldi or Lidl.

Samsung have some nice Ultrabooks in the budget range. HP also just released a new range of laptops, although I've had mixed results with HP.

My last Acer was a normal mid-range machine, it is still running and the battery still holds an hours charge, which I don't think is too bad for a 2004 model.

Personally, I'd buy a Dell XPS or Latitude model, but they are more pricey.

I'd avoid Toshiba anyway... Never had any problems with Acer. Check out the Argos leaflets, they've got just about every brand and model of it on the cheap and are a good starting point for net research

I thought Toshiba laptops were pretty good from past memory or have things changed dramatically?

They do reasonably well in terms of build quality etc. (or at least did when I worked for them). As with any large scale manufacturing they did occasionally have their issues but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

It is the amount of crapware that they install on the things, especially the number of Toshiba 'tools'.

I don't want to tempt fate but this Dell is going on six years now. I've had to replace a HDD and keyboard but it still does most things I want it to without any issue. Yes it would be nice if it could import and convert photos more quickly, but I find the kettle and teapot a great way to minimise frustration.

Boosting the RAM and upgrading from vista to 7 were the most useful things to do.

We have just changed from Fujitsu to Dell at work for our laptops. Our standard is a 14" Latitude E7440, an ultrabook with dock capabilities.

I used to love Toshibas cos they were sturdy and reliable - now they're still built like tanks but break down just as often... You name it, I've seen it go wrong with them in the past couple of years