If you're willing to pay a bit more, go with Lenovo's THINKPAD lineup. Those laptops are built with a better frame and screen hinges. The Lenovo laptops imo are probably best bang for buck atm and they come with relatively little shovelware if you don't feel like a) wiping HDD and using a clean image or b) hunting/searching around to remove junk programs. Also has decent customization on their website and can be ordered with Windows 7.