New Laptop

Upgraded my laptop at home to XPS 1530. Of course I considered an Apple (given that I'm in the US regularly), but even at dollar prices it is still well overpriced. The build quality is really nice (never thought I'd say that about Dell) and the screen is really good (although you cannot get 1920x1200 in the 15.4 form-factor - whereas you can get it if you switch to the much lumpier Dell Precision Laptop).

Overall I found the dell site pretty annoying to navigate when purchasing. For me the key features are:

• Screen Resolution - I develop in Eclipse and anything sub 1600x1050 just doesn't cut it, but the Dell site doesn't let you filter/narrow on screen resolution, just overall form-factor (15 / 17 inch). For me this is the most important feature.
  
• Processor (obviously)
• Hard-drive speed. This is really confusing - different models support different drive speeds (annoying).
• Weight - for instance check out this rather amusing sales line on the XPS 1710: "8.71kg of media muscle". nearly 9Kg!!! They should develop some sort of "Dell-Fit" exercise program to go with it.
  

So what about the supposed crappiness of Vista. Well I've shoved 4Gb into it, so Vista runs very, very smoothly. So no problems yet.