My brother has an older fujitsu laptop that has performed excellently. I don't know the model, but it's a P166, 80m ram and 3g HDD. Nothing to write home about, but it was quite nice in its day. He'd buy another.

I had a Toshiba Tecra, P120 vintage. It only broke once, a coworked plugged the modem into the office phone system and fried it. (oops)

This is a personal preference thing, but I can't stand the eraser-tip pointing device. I always carried a mouse with me with that thing.

HTH