spring for the blu-ray player
i am going to chapman university which has a huge film program. even if your school and you aren't using blu-ray now, you will be within the next four years. you probably will be by next year, in fact.
what i did for my college computing was to buy both a netbook (light and perfect for going to class) and a desktop. netbooks are SUPER cheap if you choose well (i just got an eeepc 901 for $170) and desktops are far cheaper than comparable laptops. even together, they cost less than a laptop that would have been as powerful as the desktop i got, and i don't have to haul all my processing power to class with me, just a tiny two pound netbook.

Hell, I'm still using my 15-inch laptop from Lenovo I got back in 2006. It's trucking along nicely, and plays most of my MMOs maxed out (I'm serious), like Guild Wars Nightfall, even with its piddly 915GM. I don't think I'll be moving to a new laptop for a while, but seeing as I have the money and in high school, vanity pwns all, I'm getting either an Alienware m15x or a Lenovo T400, possibly next year.

This thread pleases daddy. My laptop gave up the ghost this week. Fucking HP, I hope they rot in hell. Anyway, I'm on the lookout for some suggestions as well.

Well, what kind of laptop are you looking for?
And while everyone is entitled to their own opinion about HP (like I how I hate Dell), they have been trying to regain trust in consumer's hearts.

They didn't do a very good job with me. Frankly I wish all laptop manufacturers would stop using integrated intel video chipsets. They're shit (and incidentally that's what died on the laptop). But I digress...
I'm not too hung up on CPU speed, C2Duo 2.0 GHz or better. And I want a discreet graphics solution, not integrated garbage. I don't care if it's nvidia or ati. And of course the usual crap like a DVD burner (don't care about blu-ray) and it's got to have more than 2 USB ports. That's the one thing I loved about my HP, it had 4 of them.
As for hard drive and RAM, I don't care as I have a 500GB hard drive and 4 GB of RAM for a laptop sitting here going unused at the moment, so if I could manage to get it with the minimum for those pieces of hardware (or even completely without, but that's unlikely) I'd be set.
I hold no love for Dell either Mike, they too can get ass-raped by Satan. But unfortunately the mrs. gets a 7% (9% with the on-site 3 year warranty) discount on their garbage through her company. So right now they're kind of on the radar for me, but only tentatively.

At that price range, a nice Gateway could fit the bill, or even a Thinkpad T series. They're two of the most beefy laptops I've seen in a while. And if you must get a Dell because you get some benefits, the XPS isn't a bad series (for the price), as is the Studio. Though Dell doesn't always get the latest tech first.

if you have any sort of PC building know how I'd say give these a look-see...
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/diy_notebooks/
otherwise, give Newegg a look, I buy MOST of my PC hardware from them.
www.newegg.com
also Why did you get a machine with an integrated card in the first place? unless it's Nvidia, or ATI you will never be able to play modern games at anything near acceptable graphics... if at all.

Yeah my coworker mentioned that ocz had the diy kits. Although I am a little wary for some unknown reason... mostly because I only know ocz from memory modules.
I used my laptop primarily for work, so an integrated chipset was fine at the time. However the major reason I want something non-integrated (and thus, non-intel) is that intel's video chipset/drivers are shit, they're awful, and I will never ever support another intel video chipset in my lifetime. I had nasty incidents with my code and a broken intel driver and just generally crappy intel video hardware.