Never have considered Sony due to perceived / reported service issues with them. After being a diehard Dell and then Toshiba user for 10 years, I bought an IBM T41 this spring for law school and work use (I finally tossed the Toshiba P4-2.8ghz a few days ago after it went through its' 6th hard drive in 18 months...Toshiba replaced 4 of them free, but I got tired of the poor reliability...very tired).

The T41's been absolutely great...nice and light, a great performer and the built in wireless is flawless..great signal capture compared to my other laptops. Turning off the wireless and CD in flight give me over 4 hours of battery use. They also have an "airbag" feature that "parks" the hard drive when the machine senses that it's being moved (or dropped) while in use. Typical 10-15% off student discounts apply on IBM's as well as the other major brands.

I'm about to buy a T42 in a few weeks, as I really like the flexibility of having two laptops. Only service issue on the T41 was that one of the keys popped off after about a month's use...I called IBM, and they expressed out another keyboard, which I received the next day. So, FWIW, I can't recommend a Thinkpad highly enough...they're worth the stretch of a few extra bucks.