need laptop

[catastrophy]

I need to get a laptop (I've gone far too long without a dedicated pc...).
If you have advice or recommendations on brand/model, let's hear 'em.

My Specs:
Must run Windows 7 (No Vista!)
Have internal optical drive (I can live with out)
Portable (I favor battery life and lightweight over display)
Decent battery life (3 cell with low energy use, or maybe 6 cell)
Price under $500 pretty please?

EDIT
Current front runner: $500 Toshiba Satellite T115D (AMD Athlon™ Neo X2 Dual-Core, Windows 7, 2GB memory, 320GB hard drive)

Any opinions on the HP Mini or Dell Mini 10 / Inspirion 11z?

Comments

[idothattopeople.livejournal.com]

My Acer Aspire One (sans optical drive) was a pretty good secondary computer, until it broke. The 10" netbooks are extremely cheap, super cute, and really easy to carry around. For me, the only downsides are that the screen is small and the trackpad is annoying---if you use netbooks for long periods of time, it's more likely that you will be conscious of the computer's limitations than if you were using a big-ass laptop.