Researching Laptops for School

Hey, I'm looking to purchase a laptop for college within the next few months, and I'm researching what would be the best buy, so I thought getting different opinions would be a good idea. I'll explain what I am looking for then list the laptops that I am currently interested in.

• Concerning the price range: I don't want to spend more than 1,000 ($)bucks. I'm looking in the ~800$ range, but I am lenient either way.
• I want the laptop to serve its purpose - for school. So decent battery life is a must, what good would it be if it did not work?
• Seeing as how I will be carrying it around school, it will probably take a few hits here and there, so a good warranty or sturdy laptop would be good.
• Concerning screen dimensions: I don't really mind, but I assume the 15" will be the way to go for this. Also, I don't really need HD for this.
• Concerning weight: I don't really mind carrying it around, but the lighter the better I guess.
• I'm leaning towards the Intel Core 2 Duo processors, but if one can convince me otherwise, then that would be alright too.
• I'm not a heavy gamer obsessed with graphics, but I do like to bust out the Counter-Strike or Warcraft every now and then. So it will need to be able to handle some light gaming (I don't mind turning down the visual effects).
• I will put music and pictures and such on this, so I say a minimum of 120 gigs with a DVD R/RW drive as well.
• Also, I will be taking advantage of the wireless internet, so it must have some easy to use wireless functionality.
• I'm not really interested with loading it up with a bunch of software, so a lot of pre-requisite stuff isn't a requirement for me.

Now, I have mainly just looked into Dell's laptops, and have found the Inspiron 1525 (http://www.dell.com/content/produc [...] 25_anav2~~)
to suit my needs, however I have heard some not good things about Dell's laptops.

Please, any suggestions or comments will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I have the dell 1720 and it is a well built laptop... I've had mine for over half a year and it's held up well so far.

XPS 1530 has a base price of $999, and even with a student discount you might still be over $1000 with those specs.

I also second the HP dv6700 series. You can outfit them nicely for light gaming with about $1k.

You really won't use the 2.4GHz on the XPS machine there. You can cut it down to 1.8-2.0 to save some cash.

The day I see an Apple computer for under $1000 will be the end of the world.

Rephrase, i suppose i should-

The day I see a new Apple computer under $1000 will be the end of the world.

well, i have a dell vostro 1400 that i bought last year to start college, and it has served me well; despite what enginerd says, the intel integrated (x3100) functions just fine for CS:S, and for any games that are a couple years old; you certainly wont be playing crysis but it works great for mmos, strategy and older fps. I paid 800 a year ago and have a 1.8ghz core2, 2g ram, vista, integrated wireless, 120g hd. I went with the 9 cell battery which sticks out a little from the back but adds a good couple hours of battery life. I am extremely pleased with this notebook; it is reasonably light and very compact (14 inch screen may be small for some but it works great for me) and has served me well. If you are concerned about battery life, i would stay away from a discrete graphics card and stick to the integrated, it is also cheaper that way.