I'm buying a new laptop! Any recommendations?

Yesterday as I was working on my HTML-5 game, the frame-rate suddenly dropped and stayed like that for the remainder of my work. Yuck! It's time to get serious and upgrade from my 5 year-old Toshiba laptop w/ Intel graphics.

Give me your recommendations. Details below.

Overall Desire:

I want a new 'desktop-replacement' laptop to support game development work (2D/3D, Unreal, Unity, etc.), software programming (Visual Studio, etc.) graphic design (Photoshop), and 3D animation. I'll be working on it for at least 5 hours each day. Oh, and it should look SLEEK.

Budget:

Ideally $800 to $1200 - I'm flexible.

Operating System

Windows 7 (Home Premium or Higher)

Size and Weight:

17+ inches. I don't care about the weight.

Screen Resolution:

Probably 1920x1080, unless you recommend something else for game dev.

Portability:

It'll be on my desk 80% of the time, so as long as I can lift it and put it in my car, it's okay.

Battery Life:

It'll be plugged in most of the time, so I don't care too much.

Hard Drive:

I'd prefer at least 250GB of space, and SSD would be nice but not necessary.

Optical Drive(s):

DVD Reader/Writer preferably

Processor:

Intel preferably.

Graphics:

I'm leaning towards NVIDIA.

Thanks everyone!

Dump PC , Go for a Mac ! You can still run Windows for C2 on VirtualBox or BootCamp

Ugh no! I don't like Macs very much (although they are sexy as hell), but thanks.

I'd go for a normal gaming laptop specs with a touchscreen feature for testing gestures,etc. The rest is up to you :)

Dump PC , Go for a Mac ! You can still run Windows for C2 on VirtualBox or BootCamp

^ This

Every generic laptops aren't strong as desktop.

I want to know why are you going for Laptops if you don't want to travel much, because yes laptop are not that much powerful as desktop computers. But if you want to go with Laptop I will say one thing go for more Hard disk space than 250 GB , I am having 2TB hard disk on my desktop computer.

There is always good to have more. <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Hope this helps.

I have a ASUS G73 that is a few years old. It has its quirks and needed some crucial software updates right off the bat but has turned out to be a decent laptop for the price. Its a performance vs. quality gamble, I'd say.

Here's a decent price on the latest model:

tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp

I also would recommend picking up a SSD drive, 128MB or so, to load Windows on and maybe a few other programs IE. Firefox or Chrome for launching previewers.

I have to Second the ASUS G7X series. I have had the G73 for a few years and had another of their ROG series before that. LOVE it! Still rocks anything I throw at it.

Make sure it's not too powerful! You don't want to overestimate the performance of your game.

Just to let you guys know, in the end I went with a gaming DESKTOP from IBuyPower.com. I got convinced that getting a desktop was the way to go. But thanks for all the replies guys.

I am using Mac) I have no objections <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />