Vostro's are pretty snazzy. I bought a 1400 just under a month ago. Total was 1181.
Stats breakdown: 2.0 C2D Pentium (4mb cache, 800mhz fsb), 8400 GS, 80 gig hard drive, 1 gig ram, webcam, bluetooth, the same DVD burner as you, a 9-cell and 6-cell battery, and, much to my chagrin, Windows Vista. XP isn't offered on the 1400
Price was 1181 after tax/shipping and I also got a 3-year Complete Care warranty which also came with a 150 Dell Dollar rebate coupon thing that I can hopefully sell for ~140. So the price goes down to about 1040, but I spent 65 on RAM from Newegg and I'm probably gonna upgrade the hard drive, so the rebate is more-or-less negated by those two upgrades.
The only thing that is still niggling me is that the CPU upgrade from a 1.6ghz 2mb cache 800 FSB to 2.0ghz 4mb cache 800 fsb cost just under $200, and after having my grubby little mitts on the computer, it seems as though it's limited much more by the video card than the CPU, and having stayed with a slower processor wouldn't have made much difference.
Question: Are there any 14" laptops that have good vertical viewing angles? The first 1400 I bought I had to return because of the screen (1440x900 True-Life Glossy bullshit, looked like a mirror) but my new one (12something x 7something, not glossy) still looks too dark on the top and washed out on the bottom, no matter how I tilt it. It's especially noticeable on this forum since it has the solid black background with the colorful FoH header. I browsed briefly through the laptops at CompUSA and they all seemed to suffer the same effect; is it just because the screen is so small? I can only notice a similar effect on my desktop 19" LCD if I really focus my eyes and move around a lot to get a large angle, and even then, it's not nearly as bad as the laptops.