A grand a good budget for a good laptop i think.

I think where laptop are concerned you dont need to look much further than Dell.
Ive had a quick look at laptops around a grand and theres a pretty decent speced XPS offering(XPS is Dell's performance range of equipment) http://ecomm.euro.dell.com/dellstore...6-708036468870
Top of the line(for a laptop) processor, 2 gigs of ram, proper graphics card non of this on board crap, granted its not the best seen in a laptop but it will play a few games just not at highest graphical settings.
Vista does come with it(im not a fan either, installed on pc for 2 weeks now im back on xp pro) anyway you said you can sort out xp to put on it so thats no problem.
Also since this is a top spec XPS i think you get 24/7 tech support from Dell, cant be bad