Shortly before Christmas my old and trusted laptop also died (background light of the display is not working any more and replacing a display on a laptop is costing more than a new one usually), so i can relate to what you are going through.
I bought a new HP Pavilion dv7, which runs quite fine with Fedora Core 10 in the 64-bit variant (this is actually something which doesn't work with Windows). I still struggle with the WiFi and the sound (see
here), but VMware was installed without problems and runs an XP installation finely. Actually i too like to play games. ;-))
I downloaded the VMware 30-day-test workstation, created some machines and now use the non-charge player to run them.
Good luck to you in finding and installing another machine of your liking.
bakunin