"The patient is still in critical condition..."

So my laptop is on it's deathbed, or desk. Whatever. Anyway, I ended up with some trojan earlier today and it's been all-downhill from there. Not to mention the various problems I detailed ( in-between BSOD's) to my parents:
"
1. It doesn’t boot reliably; I just had to try three times to get it to fully boot just now. It did this before I reinstalled windows at the end of the summer and it happened again afterwards
2. The motherboard battery died several months ago. This is not supposed to happen for numerous years. We’ve never had a motherboard battery die in the years of us owning a computer. This means that if I ever take my battery out and unplug my laptop (to clean out dust, for example) I also have to pull out a RAM card because the default BIOS settings are reverted to and they won’t boot if there’s a change in hardware. While the battery should be replaceable (typically they’re watch-cell type batteries, but I’m getting the feeling it’s some proprietary one), it shouts at me that there’s some underlying hardware issue that this battery died in the first place.
3. The graphics card (one of the primary reasons I lobbied for this model in the first place) has been very ‘iffy’ lately, sometimes choking up to the point of being unusable while rendering even the simplest 3D graphics. It’s also been running quite warm, idling at about 60C (my desktop-sized processor idles at 48-52C), concerning me that something is going wrong overall with the card.
4. The PC-Card (expansion slot, like the PCI slots that sound cards etc are placed in a desktop) has never worked reliably. It blatantly didn’t work with two different firewire cards that I purchased about a year ago and can be spotty with the current USB2 card I have now
5. Integrated firewire is horribly spotty. At first I thought it didn’t work at all (hence the fire-wire cards). Often I lose connection to my external storage while transferring files, potentially permanently losing the files in question.
6. Support is all but gone for this model of laptop. There have been no new driver updates in months from Dell. I’ve found very few people online who still use this model/chassis of laptop, basically eliminating community support also. My warranty is long gone anyway, leaving me with nowhere to go if something does entirely go. I’ve already sunk a few hundred dollars into this laptop (new RAM and HDD) and I don’t even know if I could get something replaced if a part breaks, and I certainly don’t want to spend a lot of money to repair something that’s frankly more outdated than I expected it would be come two years later.
7. It’s physically deteriorating: When it reads a CD or DVD in the drive, I have to squeeze down over the optical drive so the whole thing doesn’t rattle.
8. The main battery doesn’t hold a charge at all. With the laptop off, the battery went from “fully” charged to completely dead between the morning of the trip to CMU when I turned it off and packed it and when I turned it back on that evening in the room. I have my second battery but that only has 2/3 the capacity of the primary one, basically meaning I can’t take the laptop anywhere without being tethered to a wall outlet.
9. I really regret choosing this laptop. It’s huge, hot, heavy and doesn’t even run modern software that well. A better choice would have been a business-line model (like a Thinkpad or one of HP’s business line) which is built better, more rigorously tested and comes with a 3-yr warranty at the very least.
10. It’s really my fault that I pushed for a big-powerful laptop, but in my defense I had never used one before and laptops have frankly come a long way since we were shopping for this one.
11. I truly rely on it almost 24 hrs/day. I need it to get information from professors and classmates, to do homework and keep my organized. Every hour or two I spend fighting with it because it can’t boot or decides it doesn’t want to run Solidworks, or Matlab in an acceptable manner is an hour I’m not getting work done.
12. It had 2 BSOD’s (“blue screen of death”, Dad) while I typed this e-mail to you!"

I'll likely be getting one of these (HP nc8430). I'd consider a T60 but they don't have the x1600 graphics card or Core 2 Duo's yet and also are pricier (assuming you buy equivalent warrantees) than HP's which have markedly superior configurations. HP also seems to have plenty of accessories (numerous docking stations and uber-life batteries) that the Thinkpads don't seem to. I had been considering an Acer Travelmate 8200, but I've read bad things about heating problems and overall build quality. I had also thought about various Asus models, W3J and V1J. The former has some issues with the 'sleep' functionality and has questionable availability as they're revamping it mid-model year to include a Core 2. The V1J had basically everything I'd want, but it isn't available in the US yet and I need the new computer sooner rather than later.

Just figured all three of you would like an update. That is all.