Laptop buying advice forum: I need help deciding on which brand! Please Help! (:

It's not the brand that matters. You wrote "sleek and thin looking laptop" but then go on about PERFORMANCE. You will find that having both will push the cost beyond your budget.

2. Your post didn't reveal what you use now. So it would be hard to use our laptop pickers at the top of this forum and see if what they found would be better than what you use now.

Tell a little more and is the sleek and thin really important?
Bob

I needed a backup machine for my office. I picked up a simple 350 buck Toshiba Celeron 2.1somethingGHZ and had a 2GB stick to add to it for a total of 3GB. It has the 4500MHD display chip and just today he figured out how to run the last game that wouldn't run. It was in need of a Java download.

So for less than 400 he's doing it all and it's no slouch.

For just a few dollars more you can get a nice dual core CPU and a bigger hard disk from the same maker so I'll let you look for that.
Bob

I shop around the stores so I can see the unit, the display and if I find I don't like the display or keyboard I remove it from the list. Then I shop on amazon, newegg.com, geeks.com and order it up.
Bob

Your budget is too low for what you want.

Look up the requirements for SIMS 3. That's your laptops spec. Mostly I think you will find you want a lot of RAM and dedicated Video cards. RAM is cheap to add in later. Video pushes up the price of the laptop.

Of the brands you mention my experinece is this.

HP: Busted, HP fixed. Still in use 6 years later. Design defect keeps the laptop it tethered to a base station though.
Dell: Busted, not working, worthless in warranty brick that Dell refuses to fix. But for the brick thing the laptop is nice.
Sony: No direct experience but they seem to have a good but pricy repuation.
Toshiba: (You didn't mention this). My laptop lasted 2 years. It was repurchaged under an extended warranty when they could not repair the laptop.
ThinkPad (Was IBM, Now Lenovo). Bougth old garage sale ones. They keep on working.
Apple MacBook/Pro. So far so good. No problem or repairs needed on 2 of them.

You want a laptop who's specs are going to cost you more than your budget allows. Either you need a bigger budet to get the laptop that meets your needs, or you need to lower your needs until you hit your budget.