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Working on my 6th year in IT, 1st post to GFY btw.
Laptops are an interesting investment for anyone looking to use it on the road for business. The main idea behind this purchase is you HAVE to define your needs. Do you want a laptop which has a huge footprint (amount of room it takes up on your lap/tray on the plane) that gives you a lot of desktop realestate, or are you going to go towards light weight? Typically speaking in your price range you can get a larger screen with extra lbs or your going get a light weight with a small screen.
Most people will say, i want a huge screeen! Hold on, you appear to want to travel with this thing.. Do you want a 13lb laptop just to have 17" wide screen? Doubtfully. Also graphics on a laptop, i would throw out the window. UNLESS your doing presentations with out a projection unit, then go with a nicer screen. Most applications your going to run likly are going to be word/IE/Firefox. So you can save your coin here.
After you decide the screen size/weight your looking for, you can shop a little bit. Now once you have decided on the style/brand, bump up the ram to 512mb. (unless your doing video editing, then spend as much as you can)
Likly the smallest hdd your going be able to get is 80gigs, This should be plently unless your going to do some sort of video editing, in which case go as high as you can spend.
Now all the comments in this thread sound fine... Except no one is brining up warranty. The AVERAGE life span for a laptop is 3 years or less. Get the 3 year warrenty it is well worth it. If you have to sacrafice on your system specs do it for the warranty. If business is your life, get the higher packages which guarentee onsite. If you can, do it through a business, even if its a buddies place.
My first job was an internship doing support on laptops. #1 failure was hdd, #2 dropping #3 water/coffee etc spilled. Almost all of these are covered by most vendors except for apple.
1 year ago, i had a client whos daughter dropped a G4 powerbook (a mac laptop) and created a crack on the casing. It was under warranty however they wanted over $1,000 for the repair.
Anyways i hope this helps, if you need some more help feel free to hit me on ICQ 3420164
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