I look for deals on these sites:

http://slickdeals.net/
http://www.hotdlz.com/
http://www.techbargains.com/
http://www.gotapex.com/deals.php
http://www.xpbargains.com/sitedeal.php
http://www.couponmountain.com/
http://www.fatwallet.com/
http://www.pricewatch.com

Got Apex is great for the best Dell deals. I've also got some coupon codes for Dell if you need them.

A lot of times I do comparisons on pricewatch then see if coupons are available on couponmountain.

You pretty much can't go wrong with Dell. It may behoove you to come into Dell under the Small/Medium Business rather than the Home user. The Business lines (especially with the Latitude) comes with a 3 year warranty. I can call dell with the service code about a problem and they have a technician out the next day with a replacement part (motherboard, hard disk, TFT). We've had great luck buying from Dell for the past 5 years for all our office infrastructure (We use high-end IBM for our production equipment).

-- Best, John