Dell - A reason to kill yourself....
I personally HATE dells! I have absolutely never had a good experience with a dell, laptops or desktops.
I have actually been a fan of HP laptops for a little while. They are reletively solid machines both physically and hardware wize.
If I was to buy a different laptop, it would be a barebones laptop that I found.
What I have is a hp/compaq nx7010 widescreen centrino laptop.
One of the biggest things in a purchase of a laptop is the cpu, I personally believe with backup that its not worth getting a laptop that doesnt use a Pentium M. Any other processor is very likely to overheat, die or something else. The Pentium M processor consumes less power, and is an actual mobile processor. Most warrenties are at least double than a laptop with a desktop processor.
My laptop is a centrino dothan 2mb cache 1.7ghz with 1gb of ram, 60gb 5400rpm Wd hdd, high resolution screen, I have not been able to slow it down and even after 20 day uptime it is still running strong.
I get upwards of 5hrs of battery life when the screen is dim.
Jon