[TexasSP]

Check out the offerings from Samsung right now. They have several really good top tier laptops. They have also maintained very high ratings on them. I recently purchased a Series 9 for a client (ultra thin, ultra lightweight) who is extremely picky and always has computer issues. He has had zero issues in over three months of owning this unit and loves it. Boot speed with it is about 10-15 seconds. The longest it has been is 30 seconds when connecting to the profiles on the network in his office.

I am a big XPS fan but feel like Dell of late has been slipping in the upper tier department. I have never been much a fan of their lower rung choices.

For a solid business machine the Lenovo Thinkpads (Lenovo owns IBM's laptop business now) have been fantastic. I have deployed at least a dozen of these in the past 9 months for different clients and all have performed well. Theses are units costing in the 500 range so I am sure their upper tier offerings are just as good if not better.

Honestly for a home theater unit I would build my own desktop with two terabyte plus raided hard drives. Or buy one. It's just simpler that way and if networked in your home you could still access materials off it from your laptop or any other PC.