Maybe a Lenovo T61 will do you well, they are fairly popular for being business class notebooks that are very durable. Get the 14.1" screen with maybe a 9 cell battery and that should do you good for an entire day of lectures. The T61's aren't meant for gaming but that shouldn't be a problem...
I went to my local CC and looked for Guild Wars because pxc's post in the other thread said that Guild Wars Nightfall Collector's Edition was $9.48. I got there and it was $70. Not sure if thats an old price tag. Oh well
I own a Zune 80 and I don't think you can use the touch feature to seek through music, it only lets me skip to the next song. But what you can do is set the genre of your 9 hour long song to "Podcast" and have the Zune software treat it as an audio podcast, with it being a podcast you can use...