I am at this moment cleaning up with a system restore and installing a Netgear 108mbit wireless nic on a IBM R32

Wife is going to through a fit in the morning, but the tech in West VA can have my T-22 with all the upgrades and be happy... or not

I have, it's a solid system, I do know a couple of people with Area 51's who have had some real crapper support from Alien. But then again, they are not the sharpest crayons in the box and they very well could have done something stupid and then instead of fixing it themselves they went and told them what the stupid thing was they did and Alien told them to pee up a rope...

I have another friend who works network support at Best Buy that claims to stay clear of Alien, though that might be more of a reflection of Bestbuy than the Alien company too.

I keep coming back around to the MAC 17.1 TI myself... Keep telling myself I will go another direction, but... Always seem to levitate back to it...

Sony has some nice high end graphics laptops out, I know some at WinC do not care for them and have found customers having issues with drivers and such. But I feel that is more of a reflection on the abilities of the person with the laptop, not the product.Compaq once told me without question that my 1655 laptop would not run Windows 2ooo and pretty much refused to believe it was in fact operating without any problems once I had traced down all the drivers needed...

Or course they were pushing me to purchase an Armada at the time

I can understand that... PC stuff is always a bit hard to break into the business. But optimistically if I create a good suite, whats the payoff for that?

Been shopping around for a laptop for a bit. In my opinion, a DELL gives me the most for my bucks. My budget is $2,500 CA, and I get a pretty decent computer with DELL.
Here is what I settled for, and I should be able to have my boss's signature for it next week:

Inspiron 8500 Mobile Pentium®4 Processor at 2.2 GHz w/ 15.4" WXGA Display
Microsoft® Windows® XP SP1 Home Edition - English
512MB (2 DIMMs) DDR 266MHz
64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce 4 4200 Go AGP 4X Graphics
60GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive
64MB Dell USB Memory Key
External Mouse Dell 2-Button Scroll Optical USB Mouse
Network Adapters Integrated Network Card
4x CD/DVD burner (DVD+RW/+R)
Primary Battery 72 Watt Primary Battery
Carrying Case Dell Nylon BackPack
WIRELESS PERSONAL NETWORKING CARD Dell™ TrueMobile™ 300 Bluetooth Internal Card
AirPlus Enhanced 2.4GHz Wireless Router

I haven't checked at higher end models, since I can't affort it anyway. But for my budget, DELL is definately the way to go. Neither IBM, Toshiba nor HP offers me as much for my budget.

As for quality, DELL computers are pretty well rated according articles I've read. Also, I know a few people with a DELL and they are very happy with it.

Paxx: Dell makes a good system without a doubt and it will be a solidone that can be expanded upon as time goes by and the need arises. Though I would probably go third party when doing those upgrades and cut $$$ of
the price of them. the 8200 should handle the largest HD out today and also some where around 2 gig of memory with 1 gig moduals. Though ram hasn't come down that far when you get that high. I just put 2 256meg moduals into my T-22 giving it 512 meg of ram, between that and two 20 gig drives it works fine for just about anything I like. Though I do wish it had anything other than the S3 vid chip set

ATI would be nice or nVidia

I've just had some really good luck with IBM over the years and have yet to see one fail me or one of the guys in a time of need.

Smart money says go with what you find fits your needs. As you stated bang for the buck is met for you and then some

Scooby: You could upgrade the ram and a larger HD and it would be more than enough...

Processors: To each, his own.

Kona: They are all gonna have a 64 bit chip, and it isn't really gonna matter unless you have an OS and apps that take advantage of the it. Remember 16 bit? No... you probably don't.

The processor thing is for other sites, none of us here could tell a bit of difference between Intel and AMD if we tried. Please don't start cutting and pasting technical data from l33t hardware sites. It means about as much to you as it would to an ape or any or the rest of us.

64bit is good, but xp is 32bit. Also 64bit amd=expensive. my dell laptop has a 2.4 ghz p4, 512 megs memory and a forty gig hardrive and a 32meg ati radeon mobile video card. it and a printer cost me 1200 at the end of summer(of course dell gives my college a discount). Since I have deleted all the worthless programs that dell packaged with it and reconfigured a little it has almost no problems.

I guess is should rephrase myself. My computer has some minor problems, like detecting my usb ports, but the dell support is really great.

ps I would take a amd 64bit processor any day of the week, but dell doesn't sell amd processors and i like dell

Quite a bit...too much to explain here.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1884

Loads and loads of diffference actually...

lol

ur right on the money, I need a good laptop for some advanced features, and the graphics, the AW has a decent graphics display so it works out. But I am a student and I travel alot for sports as well as bringing my pc to school everyday... laptop is the only option for me...