I highly recommend Toshiba laptops, usually the Satellite series. These machines are workhorses--they are well built and they last. Toshiba has a 1 year warranty on their new machines, and they do a good job of customer support when something goes wrong. I also think they have the best value for the price on their configurations. You can find cheaper elsewhere, but not with the same components and quality. Disclaimer: I do earn a small percentage if you purchase from the links on this page. I am very picky about which products and companies I will endorse.
Using the Toshiba links this page, check out the Satellite Pro S300 Series of notebooks. These notebooks are available with either Vista, or a downgrade to Windows XP, and they come in a variety of screen sizes. For a business machine, you'll want at least 1G of memory, but if you want to play with music or photos, go for 2G. Many of these notebooks are customizeable, so you've got options.
For a very basic, very reasonably priced work machine, look at the Satellite Pro L300-EZ1501. It has a 15.4" monitor (midsize), 1G of memory, and a 120G hard drive. Plenty of room and power for the basics, and it will let you do some photos or music work; it's just not a powerhouse. However, it's a great buy at around $550.
For a more powerful business machine with the XP downgrade, look at the Satellite Pro L350-S1701. This one has a 17" monitor (nice and big), comes with a hefty 3G of memory, and a 250G hard drive. This amount of memory will speed up photo or music editing, and will handle heavy duty Access databases or complex Excel worksheets with no problem at all. This machine will run you around $1100.
People sometimes ask me about desktop machines, but these days I really feel that notebooks are the way to go, unless you need something really special, like a digital music workstation, or a large server. If that's the case, you're probably not looking to me for advice anyway!
These days it's really easy to get additional storage and backup space using an external hard drive. These drives connect
to your computer with a USB connection, and then act just like another disk drive. I really like my Seagate FreeAgent; this one
available from Amazon.com has 500G of storage and is priced around $80.00.
Below is my "favorites" list from Amazon. The comments you see are my own.