I have really bad luck with windows machines. My previous laptop, or rather my previous previous laptop, was a Dell, and after three motherboards, two hard drives, two CD drives, four keyboards, and about 18 hours listening to their on-hold music, I decided that their half life was somewhat unacceptable and I should get a new laptop. I then bought a VAIO, and except for a dead hard drive at 11 months, it was a decent machine, until today. It seems to have suffered a somewhat catastrophic hardware failure, and I am now in need of a replacement.
As I have said in the past, I hate windows, but I need to have it only because I need Quickbooks, and the Mac version sucks. So I'm looking to you for recommendations for the cheapest, smallest laptop on the market today. I will not buy another Dell machine, their support was too crappy for me to deal with again, but anything else is fair game. I need small, because until I can get the Powerbook I want, this is the computer I'll be bringing to conventions with me, and I need cheap because I hadn't budgeted for a new windows machine yet. So please enlighten me as to my options, or recommend a really good computer repair facility.