Whatever you do, don’t buy Toshiba! I bought a L-305 laptop when my desktop crashed and trust me....it’s not even been six months and I am now having to use a borrowed desktop. It seems that Toshiba has changed their policy on warranties just this last Monday to the effect that, instead of being able to take it into an authorized repair location close by, where I could have the pc back in a day or two, I NOW have to UPS it back to the Toshiba repair depot (which is apparently just a third party repair company in Tennessee, and wait probably several weeks or longer. Basically, their warranty isn’t worth the crappy paper it’s printed on. I’ll never buy another Toshiba product of ANY kind.
My old Dell laptop was warranty repaired in Tennessee. Dell sent DHS with the packing box, driver packed the laptop in it and took it with him. I had it back in several days. I think the only thing that wasn’t new on it was my hard drive.
It is still chugging along for my son and I bought it in 2002. I did buy the 3 year special care warranty, which came in very handy (keyboard and speakers stopped working).