JoeTheBlow: Would you be intimidated by building your own? You can make a VERY sweet box without spending a ton of money on the BrandName.

Oh crud...nevermind...didn't read your post very well.

werewolf is not going to answer anymore questions this weekend...

I would like to biuld a laptop... I never heard of that before though... desktops yes, but I really need a laptop.

My desktop makes a nice test box for themes and stuff, but creating them on it is a trial. I find that also I have bugs in a theme that was not there before 2 days ago. I have so many themes on the shelf... but I refuse to upload them. For that matter, I can't even really use them myself because they cause so many problems.

Also sharing a computer with someone makes it hard to creat a theme that you need to work on.

there has got to be a laptop I can buy or make that runs all this stuff.

Making a laptop will cost you way more then what it's worth. I've checked on part prices to do that.

But I would say, IBM think pad with their dock, external mouse

thanks, you guys really helped me. I will try to get something with a Radeon chips set.

My Sony Vaio has been good to me but the female part of my power cord connection (no rude jokes please, ) is already dying and I need to bring 'er in for a tune-up (good thing I bought the extended warranty).

You have a Sony Vaio Shmoopy? I always thought they were... well crappy, but if yours is running fine then maybe I should think about getting it too.

I usually put Celron chipsets, Heward/Packard computers and Compaq computers in the same catogory as Sony Vaio. Lame. Maybe things have changed.
I am starting to hear good things about Celron. And Heward Packard merged with Compaq so maybe Sony Vaio has moved up as well.

I have heard great things about the Alienware laptops...and they come in more than black & grey. A little pricey, though.

As I type this, I'm on a Dell Inspiron 7500, 512MB RAM, PIII 600MHz, with a crappy 8MB ATI Mobility-P video card. I'm running WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, Iconpackager, ObjectBar, SysMetrix and CursorXP at the same time with a MINOR hit in speed. In fact, it's so minor that I hardly notice it except in Photoshop and Eudora, so I excepted them. I think it's all in how you put the system together, software-wise. Load one thing at a time and check for stability.

I'm rebuilding my AMD Athlon tower...can't wait to see how WB4 performs with a fast machine and a GeForce Ti4600 and a gig of RAM!

speaking of systems - i've been having some strange problems with spontaneous shutdowns and I was thinkning it was a power supply problem, since its basically now a clean install - 2.53 P4, 1.5g ram, 2x120g hdd, floppy, 1xDVD burner, 1xCDRW, and 4 USB devices, and radeon 9700 pro - should a 350w power supply run all this fine or no ?

thanks!

sigh - nod time to keep lookin

Cavanaugh - 350 /should/ push that, but it would be really borderline, if you ask me. I'd definitely look at a larger power supply. Also - what about heat? You're pushing a lot of hot items into that box - make sure you've got some /really/ good, and unrestricted airflow. Heat will cause those exact same problems you've mentioned.