Under $2000? Well you can cross Apple of your list ;-) FWIW, I've had good luck with HP laptops. I bought a 17-inch HP laptop with an AMD dual core x64 Athlon for ~$700 USD. Included was Gb LAN, Wireless (802.11b/g/n) and a lightscribe DVD burner, Bluetooth, etc. Not bad for the price. It came with Windoz Vista, which I promptly removed and replaced with Linux. For some reason HP has Vista firmly embedded in it's "ass". So you can't get anything from HP without Vista being included. Maybe that's okay for you? Checkout a site named dealnews: http://dealnews.com/. A lot of stuff is on sale now. You will probably find something to fit your needs there.
Despite sony's ethics, I've nothing but loved my vaio. Its a VGN-FW260FE. Native 160 hex 900 lcd and HDMI output. I'm typing on a 42" LCDTV at 170 hex 1000 right now. It runs WoW with all but shadows on. Only thing I change on raids is texture sizes. Spell detail stays on high. Blue ray player built in.
A bit necro on the thread here, but I've since purchased the 7805u mentioned earlier in the posts to replace my Sony, still have it and willing to sell it face to face in socal. My setup is a 42" Insignia HDTV hooked to my laptop via HDMI. I usually use 140 hex 900 res though otherwise the fucking icons are WAY too small. This rig runs Warcraft like a champ, Warhammer as well as Warhammer will run and the Aion beta tests no problem.
