Hi Cecil,

> it seems like a good deal for $399, with 1 GB RAM, 120 GB of hard disk space. Has anyone else seen these ads? What do you think?

I got a Vostro 1700 (the large one) two month ago and so far like it much better than the Sony I had before. If you don't need the extensibility of the Inspiron, the Vostro is a good deal for what you get for your money. With 1 GB I'd only install XP, though. The minimum for Vista is 2 GB, IMO. If you want to do any development on the laptop other than pure VFP (eg. SQL server, .NET, etc.), it should be more than 2 GB. Vista alone needs almost 1 GB of RAM and significantly slows down with less than 500-750 MB free RAM (in my limited experienced).