I know you have received too much info in this thread, but Skin's rec makes sense. Its in you price range and the hardware is not bad.

I manage 4 Dell laptops at work and two of them are Inspiron 1150's. I have had to replace AC adapters, a power connector and a couple of other items. They have been in use since 2004/05, cost just under a $800 I believe and between the 2 of them had $800 in service. Both are at the end of their useful life and will not be repaired again, but each at $1200 total cost/5 years of service, they were worth the investment. And they were used by sales folks who toted them everywhere.

I have also, personally used two Sony VAIO laptops and have never needed a repair. Both were heavier than I would prefer, but each has lasted 4+ years and the one is no longer in use only because of performance. I did have an issue with the CD tray not opening on its own without encouragement, but that was a result of a wee person dropping the notebook while the CD tray was open.

With the brands mentioned, it would be hard to go wrong, but for Skin's Dells, I would recommend the following:

Get a better video card. If you are using CS3 or perhaps CS4, you need decent and fast video. On board video accelerators use your system memory (the 4GB mentioned in the specs) and processor and their performance is poor. If you were using Word or Powerpoint, you would never know it. Photoshop will know it. For $100 or less, you can wait less. The Dell Outlet will have refurbs with very similar hardware and better video cards. Or you can likely pick the item Skin has listed and request the upgrade in the checkout process.

Have Dell partition the hard drive for you. The OS will come preloaded on a single drive otherwise. While I no longer work with Adobe products daily, Photoshop uses large temp files while running and in the incarnations I used, it ran much better when those temp files were on a drive other than the one the OS was on. Off the top of my head, I don't know what Windows or Dell recommends for Vista partitions, but my guess is that a C: drive of 40 GB and a D: drive of 280 GB will work. Install CS 3 on either drive and set the scratch disk for Photoshop and Illustrator (the place where the temp files are written) for the D: drive. This will also make it easier to reload OS software in case of emergency.

Good luck.