just adding another voice to the mix:
If you don't like win XP stay away from HP's because they can ONLY run XP now. Fun eh?
Also, don't say you don't want centrino yet. There's a big advantage to that setup - battery life. The pentium M processor can be throttled back when heavy processor use isn't needed, and it can get you amazing battery life.
Take a look at the Toshiba Satellite 5205 series.
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...lite&pmod=5205
you can get it for around $2,600. I was playin' with it the other day in a geek store and it is a BEAUTIFUL laptop. The display is the best I've seen in a laptop (and it rivals most desktop displays to boot), the layout is good, considering how loaded it is the weight is very reasonable. 64mb GeForce graphics card, 60gig HD, 512mb PC2100 RAM, DVDmultidrive (combo of DVD-R/RW and DVD RAM), and integrated wired and wireless networking. It's an impressive toy. If I had a spare 2600 lying around I'd snap it up.