Best Current Options for Production-Dedicated Laptop?

[atomiser]

After not paying attention for a while (and never really paying that close attention to begin with), I was shocked to discover how relatively cheap seemingly powerful laptops have gotten.

I was hoping somebody a lot more knowledgeable could suggest the best bang-for-the-buck models out there right now, or at least the specific features I should definitely look to get or avoid. And much as I feel attracted to Macs, I have too much invested in Windows-based machines to switch at this point in time (perhaps some day in the future).

The price-span is pretty wide. Browsing at a store, it seemed the machines priced $700-800 were pretty incredible, and the only major differences I could notice in cursory 2-second comparisons with $1700-1800 models was generally some combination of better brand name, better graphics card, slightly larger screen, and/or slightly larger hard drive. I'm sure there are probably a lot more differences among them, so again please feel free to point out what to watch out for.

I don't want to spend money on features I wouldn't need (like a top of the line graphics card for gaming), but do want to have something that won't crash running a DAW and at least a few softsynths simultaneously. Since what version of Vista you're running makes a huge difference itself, what's recommended there, in terms of having what I need and not paying for what I don't? And though I'm finally committing myself to software sequencing, and doing my own recording, I'm still not too big on using laptops live, if that makes a difference in your suggestions. Thanks for the advice...