I've probably used about 30 varieties of HP laptops, puls all other makes, the new HPs are light, look good, and are functional at a decent price. I've just spent 3 months evaluating laptops from IBM, Toshiba, Dell and HP, and I chose to go with the HPs.
Also, on the note of the old HP Pavilions, I went to visit my family down south they were still running a Pentium 133 HP Pavilion, 24mb of ram etc, and it did its job perfectly. So it's all in how you use it as well
