There are a bunch of interesting systems I'm looking at from Dell and Fujitsu, in the $1300-1600 range. IBM is too pricey, and systems cheaper than that don't have what I want. Here's what I'm looking at:

Fujitsu S2000 Lifebook Athlon 1900+ Mobile 13.3" screen 512M RAM 60G drive modular DVD No floppy 100M Ethernet/802.11g $1459

Dell Inspiron 8500 P4/2.2Ghz 15.4" screen 256M RAM 40G drive CDRW/DVD combo 100M Ethernet No floppy $1308 ($1572 with wireless and 60G disk) (all this is with a $300 rebate for the 8500 line)

There are some other systems I'm looking at, but these are the front runners. It's hard to choose.. I should visit the CMU computer store tomorrow, and also check the newsgroups to see if anyone's selling a used system close to my needs.