i'm not Sony's lover at all but after several notebooks served by myself I can say that Sony is the only tuner of their hardware. They integrates cpu with higher frequences, faster memory, reliable & fast hdd's, their lcd panels are fine too as for me ). If you are planning to buy sony will be much better choice. The only bad side is the price of Sony notebooks )
HP, especially their DV6 DV7 series are the top brand of failures in my region i think with their Compaq brothers). they don't love dust at all. Their AMD cpu's loose HM76 chipset dual core cpu's ) core i5 will be excellent choice. The only thing to do - add at least 2Gb PC1333/1600 of RAM into free memory slot to turn on dual channel mode, change hdd into SDD (Kingston V+ series) & your note will start WIN8 64BIT within 11-15 seconds )