By all means... stay away from Compaq laptops...
Sub-par equipment that will NOT last. Sure Compaq may have great customer service, but do you want to USE your laptop or just continually fedex it back and forth to Paq?
If $1700 is all you can budget, you probably won't be finding a P4 lappy with all the features you want/need. I'd suggest looking at lappys with AMD chipsets... they're lower priced and have about the same performance.
I think Dell has some AMD models. Perhaps Toshiba as well.
Just my 2/100 $...
--JamesT
