[Klug-general] Laptop purchase. any recommendations?

[Matt House]

Hi all

Due to lack of space, and in an effort to reclaim some of the spare  
room, I'm contemplating the idea of moving over to a laptop for the  
majority of my uses.

Problem is I haven't used a laptop extensively (netbooks aside) for so  
long I'm not really sure what's good any more!

My current set up is a 2.4GHz Core 2 with 2Gb DDR2 and an Nvidia  
7600GT. I'd like something that roughly matches those specs. I'm also  
looking at something that is portable as I commute into London on a  
daily basis and would like to be able to use it on the train.

I've been looking around and think I've found a couple of machines  
that I think fit the bill, one being the Dell XPS M1330[1] and the  
other being the Thinkpad x61[2].

What I'm after is to start of some good banter about decent modern  
laptops for Linux (Arch is my flavour of choice) and hopefully glean  
some recommendations/pitfalls from peeps.

To put this in perspective the last laptop I used extensively was a  
Pentium III Thinkpad x21 :P

Apologies if this has been done to death already!

Matt

[1] http://www.reevoo.com/reviews/ean/5391507660855
[2] http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3765