Apple MacBook.
1 - MUCH higher resale than any other brand. Check out Ebay - 3-4 year old macbooks sell for $450-700.
2 - Local Apple stores will do warranty repair for the 1st year, no hassles, and AppleCare is an excellent no hassle insurance system for longer warranties.
3 - You can run Windows XP/ 7 *and* Mac OS X on them. If you have no use for OS X, just run Win 7.
4 - Quality is high and consistent; you know what you're getting.
5 - If there are any problems, they are popular enough that you'll know what the problems are and what the remedies are - and Apple is usually held to task to fix those problems (as opposed to obscure models of other brands where you have a relatively small group of other owners).
6 - For what you get spec wise, they aren't really much more expensive than other brands - ie, right now the low end Macbooks have Nvidia M320 GPUs.