Well, just as an update, my friend ended up buying that notebook I linked in my first post. We sat at the PC and scoured the internet for notebooks with similar specs and couldn't find anything lower in price then the Acer. So he bought it. It comes with a 1 year limited warranty and he bought the 2 year extended warranty.
He ordered it on Wednesday morning and got it on Friday afternoon from Newegg with standard shipping. Not bad at all.
So we fired it up and I did all the first time start-up stuff for him.
I must say, i'm pretty impressed with this notebook. For $1,100 USD it's got a nice performance package. We installed a copy of BF2 on it and patch it. Fired up BF2 and set all settings to Mid. I logged on with my account and played for about 20 minutes. I was totally shocked at how well it ran and was just as good as a desktop. We also put HL2/CS:S on it and he played that for a bit. It looked great actually and played extremely well. So all in all the Radeon X1600 Mobility is a pretty decent notebook card and seems to handle pretty good.
I really liked the Keyboard's feel. Very quiet and nice touch to it. The screen is 15.4 and is really nice also. We popped in a DVD to check out movies and it was crystal clear and looked perfect.
So far so good with this notebook. I'd say it's a heck of a deal. With his 3 years worth of warranty, it should be a great notebook to get him through college. Oh, yeah... the specs on newegg said, "1G" but, I don't know what happened, because he got one with "2G", which was like $1300 - we aren't going to say a word.
Bottomline - If you want a cheaper laptop that will handle anything... This is a perfect choice.