I work for a laptop co here in NZ, Portables Plus....
I Mainly work as a Wireless Data engineer, but do service notebooks as well.....
As a Desktop Replacement I'd definatly recommend the following.......I consider this the Ultimate in notebooks, havent seen anything come close to these features....
Toshiba Satellite 5100 series, 5105-S702
Equipped with a Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor - M4 1.80GHz , 512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM, 512KB Level 2 Cache integrated on die
400MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) clock speed
Memory
Toshiba Personal Theatre 15" UXGA active matrix display (1600 X 1200),
NVIDIA® GeForce4™ 440 Go graphics controller with 64MB DDR VRAM,
DVD/CD-RW multifunction drive,
60GB1 Hard drive,
Yamaha Sound System featuring harman/kardon® Stereo, Speakers with subwoofer,
Dolby AC3 digital port,
i.Link™(IEEE 1394) port,
1 SmartMedia™ slot
1 SD card memory slot
10/100 Ethernet, V.90/56K modem,
Wi-Fi™ (802.11b),
Bluetooth module,
cPad™ transparent touchpad, full function remote control, Windows XP Professional.
I honestly must say, the subwoofer sounds pretty descent...
also the Integrated customizable LCD in the touchpad just blew me away
...
The 2.4GHz CPU versions have been released in Japan, soon to be released worldwide, these also feature removable usable keyboards, n 16" screen options.
cheers,
JaBZ