I've got an Acer TravelMate 3260 and don't have many complaints so far.
The hard drive seems to get hot, but that's normal for a laptop. Also, it doesn't have an external volume control either, but it does have hotkeys for volume (Fn+up/down).
It is fairly light, compared to others I've used. It could probably idle for around 3 hours or a little less on a full battery; I'm not sure how this compares to other notebooks.
I recently ordered a Dell for work. So far I've been impressed by that system as well.