ya i think im gonna have to raise my price to 1000 lol. Just checked some of the dell's out (XPS), very nice but the screen res isnt too great. Gonna check ebay like you said and see if i cant find a nice one for cheap.. Just a little skeptical about buying on ebay (reliablity etc). that inspiron you found is quite a deal! Hopefully I will have the same luck
YOu should check out the Inspirons, the XPS's are decent, but overpriced. You can get a decent Inspiron system for around the $1,000 price range.
And Dell's displays are awesome. You just have to choose the option to upgrade the display. I had an Inspiron E1705 17" laptop with a resolution of 1920x1200, it was a BEAUTIFUL display. In a 15" you can get a 1680x1050 display. (though the 15"ers don't come with a really powerful vid card.)
Plus, if you plan to game with this, you have to consider that with a higher native resolution you will have to game at a lower, non-native resolution. Which in some cases can make the display blury. But of course the high res is nice for normal desktop usage.
BTW, here's a good site to compare notebook graphics chips:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile...rk-List.844.0.html?&or=&search=&sort=3dmark06
They should be sorted fron highest to lowest performance in 3DMark06, so that should give you a good idea of high to low performance.
EDIT: Also I would really recommend that you try to get a system with Windows XP. Vista is great, but on a laptop that is already limited in performance, Vista will just slow it down more. You will get more performance out of it by using XP. Also, I don't know if the new Dells are like the old ones, but With my E1705, I could overclock my 7900GS to 7900GTX speeds (scored 5000 in 3DMark05, which is pretty decent for a laptop, especially over a year ago). So you might check into that, if you can OC the vid card, that can add a lot of performance!
EDIT #2: After a quick look over at notebookreview.com's forums, it looks like overclocking is still an option for many notebooks. So that can greatly increase performance, you just have to be careful with temps.