"b82rez 2ge4 No, b-eight-two-rez - be-attories, batteries. 2-geh-4 - together... Me was trying to save time." (If you have seen Ali G Indahouse, you know this quote.)

Sorry, I haven't worked with ASUS laptops, but I know their motherboards are very decent. That said, I don't know their laptops. I believe Lenovo and IBM are praised as very solid laptops. If you've got the money, you could buy a new aluminium MacBook or MacBook Pro, both of which are very solid and durable, and then throw Windows on it (if you dare :laugh:).

I had an Acer TravelMate for three years. I take very much care of my things, so I know it's not my treatment that caused the need of several repairs. Everyone in my high school class (between 2005 and 2008) had the exact same model, and everyone (literally!) had to have it repaired at least once. The most common problem was the screen hinges breaking off after common use. Given that it's a TravelMate, it should be able to be travelled with. How ironic.

One thing you shouldn't do is buy Acer. Other than that I can only recommend HP, Dell or Apple (of those I've tried myself).

My Firebug is also extremely buggy. I don't know why but there's a few features missing. For instance, in FF2 the items were highlighted on the page when you had your pointer over the corresponding item in the HTML code. Mine doesn't do this anymore. Also when I try to edit the HTML source in Firebug, the content area (tag tree list) doesn't get replaced with a textarea. The textarea is just 150x50-ish placed in the upper left corner. I surely hope that the author fixes it for FF3.