[chris_b_]

I'd second the Ideapad. Not sure about recent versions, but I've had the Z510 for >2 years and it is great. I took out the CD drive and have an SSD + 1TB HD and it runs fedora with almost no issues (wifi drivers on some kernel upgrades). Only downside is the battery which was never great and after 2 years is down to about an hour.

Cost me about $700 2 years ago and other than the battery is perfect.

[saghm]

You're right, I completely forgot to mention the battery life! Mine is around 2-3 hours currently, and it will probably go down as it gets older. My last laptop had similar specs and similar battery life, so my current thinking is that most high-spec 15" laptops just have crappy battery life (although I've never owned a 15" Macbook, so if they have similar battery life to the 13" ones, they wouldn't fit this hypothesis). Of course, I have extremely few points of data for this, so if someone has had a different experience with a similar laptop, I'd love to hear about it!