You can usually put together a fairly solid Dell laptop and not pay too much. There is always a coupon for something Dell discount related. The caveat is that it's a Dell...but how big of a caveat is that really? Crappy tech support, occasional problems out of the box, and an OS initially loaded with bloatware is all fixable if you don't mind spending a day or two formatting.
Vista is sex. I no longer need to spend hours installing stupid Dell drivers. It auto detected EVERYTHING. The only things I installed was my logitech mouse driver, and a Vista 32bit graphics driver with Nvidia's forceware. But i digress....
http://www.4computercoupons.com/
Assemble a nice ~$1300-$1400 inspiron e1505, and see what happens.
Don't buy more than the minimum RAM amount from dell either, they rip you off. That's something you can get for cheap on Newegg.
Acer, Sager or Asus all have great models, but you should research them and check out prices.
I was looking at the Asus w3j at the time of getting my laptop, but i ended up not because it's a bit pricey. But it's a sexy little thing.