I have had several laptops ranging from Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Compaq, IBM and recently HP and Alienware.
Out of all of the older ones the Dell has lasted the longest.. I dropped that sucker like 100 times and it still kept working... but avast...an idiot friend of mine dropped a table on it when I was helping him move... cracked my LCD, the laptop still works but since it is out of warranty.. i'm stuck with a really small desktop.
My HP was fairly reasonable in price (HP Pavilion zx5040us) and is a game powerhouse, It cost me $1,600 but they gave me $300 in rebates so I wound up paying $1300 for it.
Its a P4 2.8Ghz, 512MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9200 Mobility 64MB Vid Card, 60 GB Hdd, USB 2.0, Firewire, Digital Media Drive (for digi cam memory cards), Modem, Ethenet, Integrated Wireless Card. Not bad for money.
The Alienware on the other hand smokes the HP but it costs $1500 MORE. It has a P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB Ram, 60GB HDD, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 - 128MB Vid Card. The works, its awesome but like I said, it costs over 3k.
I recommen getting the HP, you'll get very good processing power for a reasonable price.