VHG points are valid.
Sony laptops are a royal pain in the preverbal, you start by paying over the odds for the name, they use proprietary hardware ID's on a lot of their hardware meaning standard drivers won't work with them and then they have a habit of dropping support for "older" equipment fairly quickly so you suddenly find you can't get drivers for them easily (I get really fed up with having to customise driver packages to make them work on Sony's!)
HP, Dell, Toshiba, Acer, Samsung, lenovo (basically all the big brands) are normally a pretty safe bet, out of all of them I would go for either Dell or HP as their support tends to be better than most.