If you can stretch the budget slightly (depending on which retailer you go to prices vary between $1100 and $1200) the Benq R56-BV35 is a good little unit. It Comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 2.40GHz, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, 15.4 WXGA screen (1280x800 res), GeForce 8400M Graphics card, Super Multi 8x DVDRW, 10/100 LAN, 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless, Webcam, Windows Vista Business.
You will find a lot of the really cheap notebooks come with no where near enough ram and cheap/slow chipsets on their motherboards (this makes a massive difference to the performance of the notebook), typically the SIS and VIA based chipsets do not have the same performance as the Intel ones. If you get a chance go to a retailer and see if they will let you try out a couple of the display models to get a feel for how responsive they are (restarting the machine and seeing how long it takes to boot up to a usable state in windows is also a good way to test what it will be like opening large / resource hungry programs.