One comment about "wide screen" laptops. They are obvious wider but not as tall as the old 4x3 format. This might be a bother in some cases.
A friend bought an HP with a 17" widescreen. One feature that I thought was VERY nice is that it has has a standard PC keyboard with separate number pad. I don't like most laptops since the number keys are second functions embedded in the QWERTY keyboard.
But the 17-in models aren't going to be light and may not come in rugged versions at your price.
The Toshiba hard drive on my less-than-two-year-old HP laptop failed. HP wanted something like US$450 to just sell me a replacement drive, not installed. My local computer store sold me an identical Toshiba replacement drive for about US$75. Installation took under an hour. The XP CD that came with the laptop formatted the new HD and loaded the opsys in one swell foop. Very easy, but of course I had lost everything I hadn't backed up before the failure. It took at least a couple of days to reinstall the user files which I had backed up. Getting going again would have been MUCH faster and easier if I had made a drive image using Acronis True Image or Symantec Ghost.
Back up often. That's why I suggest buying a good external hard drive. Keep a fairly current Acronis or Ghost drive image on the external drive. You may need it some day.
Hard drives DO fail. I had treated my PC gently and seldom travel. I used it as a desktop replacement.
seacue