Dell and Lenovo are the two best if you want a big name company with a big support infrastructure in case something goes wrong. If you don't mind buying from a smaller company, I've been very impressed with the overall quality and price/performance of Asus laptops in the past couple years. They tend to have less junk pre-installed as well, and the one time I have had to deal with their customer support they were very good.

Newegg has a big selection of Asus laptops, and any of them should be able to do a VPN and remote desktop without issue.