Look, I can compare Acer with IBM (now Lenovo), as my friend had BOTH at the same time (IBm was abt 6 months older than tha Acer). And I have an Acer. And the Acer kicked the thinkpad's ass in build quality, LCD quality AND design. I have used Toshiba too, long ago, and even there the chassis material in no way cam up to the Acer. I have seen new Dell laptops (Inspiron 660 was it?) and HP Pavillion notebooks from the US (both) and they do not match up in quality to the Acer.