For the average person, HP would be the best imo. However, I bought a laptop with the intention to do music. The USB 2.0 ports have the lowest IRQ priority on the device, which means they work horrible with external audio devices. The internal ones have pretty high latency, can't handle too many plugins at once because of this, and extremely limited input options. Everything else about the computer is great and I love it... but it kinda fails hard at the one thing I purchased it for.
Worst: Apple, because of the price vs quality. Apple's are pretty good, although extremely over priced considering how limited they are. PCs don't crash that much anymore. My laptop has maybe crashed 5 times in two years. I don't see the point to paying 40% more money just to reduce 2.5 crashes a year to 2 crashes a year.
