HP laptops are not junk. Nor are the Vaios that were affected. The Nvidia chip was junk and those firms got the blame. Plenty of other non-Nvidia HPs and Sony's are perfectly good.
I'm not one to argue, but I'm going to argue. Hp's are junk, their build quality is garbage and there support is crap. I have several logs from HP support sessions that I did everything in my power not to go Freakazoid and dive through the internet to strangle some idiot's neck.
With the nVidia issue, HP is mostly at fault for knowing of the defect, continuing to ship product and knowingly deceiving users into doing bios updates and driver updates to "fix their issue" until the product was out of warranty and THEN offering to have it repaired for $250.
Sony's have built an empire of difficult to repair laptops (go ahead, remove a hard drive from an average Sony in less than 10 minutes) and their support is even more difficult to get ahold of.
Last year I saw lots of Toshibas all with disk problems with the crappy Toshiba drives they have in them. Some of their models also had terrible overheating problems.
I love Toshiba laptops, but I hate Toshiba hard drives... And they're not made my Toshiba... They're made by Fujitsu (Toshiba hard drive tool? Nope, Fujitsu hard drive tool). I have 6 Toshiba laptops and they have 0 issues, including my oldest laptop. My primary computer? Toshiba p505 that has MAYBE been turned off for all of 8 hours since the day I bought it at the end of 2008 (3 of those hours were for ram, cpu, hdd and keyboard upgrades that were NOT initiated by bad hardware, just wanted bigger and better). For the over-heating issues, they placed the GPU on top of the CPU and used a dry thermal compound. Replace with a silicone paste, DONE!
As to the rest of your comment... Agreed.
