laptop suggestions

[nowimnothing]

I am looking to buy a laptop in the next month and was hoping for some suggestions. I plan on using this mainly for development and mainly plugged in but don't want to disreguard multimedia and battery life.
My Requirements
---------------------------
wide screen display (15.4")
512 Mb RAM
Not Mac (not that they are bad, please no flaming)
<$2,000

The two systems i am mainly looking at ate the eMachines M6805 and the Dell Inspiron 8600 here are the main specs

Dell EMachines
------- ----------
P-M 1400 Mobile AMD Athlon 64 (3000+)
15.4" WSXGA+ 15.4" WXGA
512 333 Mhz RAM 512 DDR PC 2700
40 GB HDD 60 GB HDD
32MB FX GO5200 RADEON? 9600 Discrete 64MB
9 Cell (4 Hrs) 8 Cell (2.5 Hrs)
3 Yr (No LCD) 3 Yr (LCD Covered)
$2000 $1900

My main worries with the eMachines notebook is the WXGA display, the 8 cell battery and the (power hungry???) Athlon 64, but the specs and price are really supperb. Does anyone have thoughts on the Athlon 64 Mobile vs the 1.4 Centrino in terms of both performance and battery life? Is there a big difference in the WXGA and WSXGA+ display? Does anyone have any suggestions on systems i haven't looked at?
Thanks in advance,
~L

 

[BargainSeeker]

See this thread.

 

[LaptopDude]

the dell 8600 doesn't skimp on battery life! i think the pentium-m is mainly to thank for that. and for development you should seriously look at the WUXGA screen on the 8600...the quality is beautiful and a lotta realestate, all 1920x1600 of it. the rubbish you hear about font sizes is a load of rubbish, they can be enlarged easily. try avoid dell's WSXGA...they have a history of being poor quality.

 

[Hellblast]

Hi
Just my $0.02 worth. I was looking at the 15.4" displays for a while until I saw the Dell 8600 at one of Dell's stations in a local mall. I didn't like the way it looked at all. I then refined my searches to include any 15" screen with higher than XGA resolution and arrived at an Acer laptop (TM800 series). Their screen is 1400x1020, which I really love on a 15". This Centrino lasts long, the Mobility 9000 is pretty fast too.
It's got 512MB and comes with Windows XP Pro.

Hellblast