I'm very happy with my Toshiba. As powerful as VAIO models, but less expensive
The difficult thing about laptop shopping is that the retailers and manufacturers purposely make it hard to compare apples to apples. The model names often change (ever so slightly). I know with Toshiba... my model is A105-s4334. The second half of that number changes depending on which store you're looking at, so if you, for example, want to do a search on newegg, search by the first part of the model number.