What are the big differences between the different grades of laptops?

[bd1886]

Like everything else...You get what you pay for. Several friends received lappys for X-mas. (One received an Asus, one a Dell and three Toshibas.) All are spec'd similar enough but the cost between 'em was as much as $600.00. The Asus was the most expensive by far and the others ran between $500.00 w/rebates and $850.00.

Was talking with the guy's at Infotech and they said that they pretty much just sold Asus laptops because, from their experience,they had the least hassles with them. Have every reason to believe them (because of their great reputation with all the local builders) but not everyone can afford the better quality.

Where do the "value" laptops fall down as they age? Where are the corners cut? It seems a lot more straight forward to see these differences in towers that you can easily open up for a look see(plus the huge amount of people that have experience building and servicing them to give you the run down)but laptops don't tread on that familiar ground just yet.

To those of you few who do...What are the engineering differences?

[Lespaul20]

This biggest thing I've noticed with older laptops is the hinges for the LCDs. A lot of them seem to lose their ability to hold the LCD up. I've seen this on both Dell and Gateways and they all have been pretty old(about 4 or 5 years) so your probably pretty likely to upgrade by that time. I've seen keyboards fall apart also. I think quality overall has improved and all companies and models have their nuences.

[thefultonhow]

Hinges, internal screen cables, palmrests, motherboard components, optical drives. All of those have been issues I've seen on cheaper laptops. Luckily, since Dell uses very similar components on all their consumer-level laptops, they're higher quality than they used to be. When Dell had separate low-end chassis (Inspiron 26x0, 11x0/51x0, etc), those laptops tended to have subpar components. Toshibas are sort of the same way, although I haven't really had any experience with them since my brother's M35x from 2004, which was in for repairs four or five times.