first thing's first, stay away from dell, in a word and from a professional point of view, they are crap..lol
I personally would suggest you buy a laptop with an Athlon64 1GB DDR & 100GB HD, This should have enough power, speed and graphics to run most current applications. I have a presario r4000 which I use for work which is AMD Athlon64 2.0 GHz CPU, 512 DDR 800Mhz, 60GB HD and it is quite sufficiant for home or office use I bought mine for �700 about six months ago so it should have come down in price, it also comes with a DVD RW and all other lovely little gadgets we techs love...lol