Looking for a laptop

[HajiShirazu]

I would like to buy a laptop and realized that I don't really know anything about computer hardware anymore, especially when it comes to these things.
All I want the computer for is poker and basic other stuff that anything would run, like web browsing, mp3s, etc. I don't really care about performance other than that I want to be able to 9 table smoothly on prima or 12 table on stars, which requires something near a 1600x1200 screen. Most of my play is on prima so I wouldn't use it for huds/pt or anything like that.
Anyway I would like to spend as little as possible. And since I hear vista basically totally sucks and I don't want to spend $ on XP cds to downgrade, if possible I would like a late model machine with XP. Can someone tell me what to look for in a model that is say, 2-3 years old, or is this a really bad idea and should I suck it up and get a new model + XP cd?