Lona, the only recommendation I can make to you regarding notebooks is to go for a quality brand.
In our shop, we get a lot of notebooks for repair and very often we cannot get the parts for the less well known brands. We hardly ever get problems getting parts for machines from the likes of Toshiba, Sony and Compaq as they tend to keep then in stock for a relatively long time.
Of course, the only drawback of buying the quality brands is the price. However Toshiba and Compaq appear to have brought their prices down quite a bit lately.