I just took a quick look at Dell's laptops and you can get their Inspiron 9300 (17" widescreen) starting at $1199. Adding 256 Mb RAM to get up to 512 Mb is $50 and it's worth spending $69 for another 20 Gb hard drive space. It comes standard with a 64 Mb Mobility Radeon graphics chip and a DVD burner. It's $300 off till Wednesday and has free shipping. That puts the laptop $19 more than what you wanted to spend, but this is a very good multimedia machine. Had this been available at this price back in January, it's what I would have purchased instead of the Inspiron 5150. I'm happy with my laptop and have gotten used to seeing better products come along after I buy one.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon