If I could pick the notebook of my choice, I would go with the Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 or Dell Inspiron 6000. Both have the 2 GHZ/2MB Cache 533 MHz fsb Pentium M 760 Processor and 1GB DUal channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533mhz. I hate, hate, hate Dell customer support, but if you can afford to backup your system when it breaks down there is nothing like receiving a brand new replacement (or refurbished one) within 48 hours and shipping the bad one back in the same box. The website support is great though and an easy means of keeping up to date with drivers, etc.

What concerns me about buying non-brand notebooks is the service, support, battery, and cooling systems. Not sure how reliable they are unless you know someone who has purchased the same in the past and had good luck. While ideally you would find one at an affordable cost that experiences little or no hardware failure, you really have to find someone who has experienced some type of hardware fault though in order to test customer support and warranty replacement.