Toshiba Satellites can be a decent price. I'd personally recommend some HP laptops, since they are becoming quite cheap and have a lot of extras.
For example, mine has webcam, 2 gigs ram, 1.5 dual core, 250 gig hdd, remote, multimedia buttons, lightscribe, etc. and it was only $1000. For the same price today you can get 3 or 4 gigs of ram plus another .2 ghz in a dualcore processor.