In April I bought my current Dell Inspiron 9300: 1.86ghz Pentium M, 1gb DDR2 Dual Channel, 60gb 7200rpm HD, 256mb nVidia GeForce Go 6800, 17" widescreen
It's a very powerful machine, light for a 17" screen (7.5lbs) and after using an $800 off coupon code from
www.edealinfo.com , I got it for < $2000. If not this laptop, at least get one with the Pentium M chip.
For your reference, its 3dmark05 score is 2868 and 3dmark03 is > 9000. I can post a SolidWorks 2005 SPEC score later if you want it.