I perused Google a bit and the Toshiba Portege has some decent reviews. It looks like a nice laptop.
I'm both a Mac and PC person (total overall geek!) and I've had good experiences with Dell laptops and a bad experience with a Toshiba one.
My Toshiba laptop I got in 2004, so this info probably isn't relevant at this point. It just died on me too fast (after six months) and I made the mistake of getting it at Best Buy so I got screwed over. Don't buy it from Best Buy. You STILL get screwed over.
I got a Dell XPS back in 2006 and it still runs great. It was a 12" laptop so it was the smallest around (this was before netbooks) and very light. The warranty on it was great too. My brother got a Dell netbook about a year and a half ago and he loves it.
I switched from a desktop to a laptop and I would never go back. Laptops are just so much more versatile and portable and if you still want that desktop experience, you can do that! Occasionally I'll plug my macbook into my monitor, attach a keyboard and mouse and have a desktop computer.
Having a laptop has made college and now working much, much easier than it would have been otherwise.
My brother is a different story. While he loves his netbook, he would rather have a desktop computer. However, he's a computer science major and therefore enjoys building and tinkering with computers
a laptop is certainly not for him.