I know this is a little late, but lately I've been buying the Acer 4200 series at work. They seem to be pretty well-built, price point is good (this is a med-to-higher-end model), features are excellent. I haven't had them long enough to really know if they are going to last, but so far no issues and no need for support. We've got 16 of them now. One is mine, so I'll be using it and checking it out more over the next few months.
I also support a lot of older Dell laptops and for the most part they are in good shape, just getting old and dying here and there. Other than the few odd models that had somewhat serious issues (like the overheating and CPU heatsink thermal grease issues), they are pretty solid. And Dell has a pretty good support system where you can find all kinds of historical and support info for the life of the machine.
The one thing I hate about Dell is that the getting updated drivers for the older machines isn't as easy as it should be. For example, if you don't know what is in a particular model, even with the service tag, Dell's support site gives you a list of many drivers and you have to guess which is in your machine. It's ok if you have the network driver and can run their web-based utility to see what's in the machine, or the initial system config. But in some cases with the older laptops they don't mention the networking details... so now I've made my own library of Dell drivers for the machines I support. of course, many of these machines were out before XP was, so upgrading to XP is why I run into these problems.