Last November, CompUSA had a 17" HP notebook on sale for $449 on Black Friday (the big sales the day after Thanksgiving). So I switched from the notebook I had in the Family room to it.
It's called BigHP on the network.
The timing was good, because son Chris' notebook failed in December so he got the old notebook. By pulling the drive from his old notebook we recovered everything he had.
I like that computer, it has a nice large screen and is reasonably fast (dual core AMD CPU and 2 GB RAM). It had Vista but when I couldn't get the network printers to work, I downgraded it to XP.
It's a great platform for playing with the web (and my favorite advanced productivity software, Solitaire) while watching TV with the family. I've also done a lot of my Drupal development using that system.
In April, the keyboard popped a key. I called HP and they immediately overnighted a box to return the notebook along with a prepaid shipping label. I shipped it back and they returned the system in less than a week. It got a new keyboard and a new keyboard bezel case (which was cracking on the front left corner).
May 31st, I was working on BigHP and it dropped dead. It would appear the power module on the motherboard failed (about the same failure mode as Chris' notebook).
So again I called HP and again they overnighted a shipping box (even though I had the box from the last repair, they don't have any ability to not ship a new box). Unfortunately the timing must be bad, because instead of a couple of days at the repair center its going to be a couple of weeks.
Even though HP will restore Vista to the machine while they have it, I have an image backup from the first repair and a file by file back up from just before shipping the notebook back (I had to pop the drive out and back it up using another computer since the notebook was dead).