A couple of links regarding the OS that you may want to look at:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2210387,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2209837,00.asp

I've had only Dell laptops for quite awhile. I've found that the Dell service is poor. To me, this was showing up a good while ago, but in the last couple of years, Dell has struggled because a larger audience was seeing the problems and going elsewhere. The computers themselves have mostly been fine. I did have to send one back and though I was supposed to get onsite service, they claimed the repair couldn't be done onsite. I think that was a crock and they simply wanted to save the money that a service call would cost. So I had to wait a week. That time, or maybe it was another, the machine was stolen on the way back by the DHL driver (I had removed the memory, hard drive, and battery at Dell's request, so it wasn't a great haul). To their credit, Dell replaced it with a nicer machine. However, I was not going to buy Dell again except that two years ago at Thanksgiving I saw a $750 coupon off a Dell laptop on www.techbargains.com. So I got an Inspiron 9300 that was $2700 for $1950. It was kind of hard to pass up. I'm thinking about buying a new laptop. I might buy Dell, I might not.


>I have recently received some ads via email about a DELL Laptop called VOSTRO 1000; 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?
>
>Are DELL's laptops any good any more? I own an HP Laptop and I like it but it seems way too slow for me.
>
>You can choose either Windows XP or Vista. Which O/S would you think is best? I've heard so much bad about Vista, that it is slow when coppying files. Is this true?