Yep, that's almost exactly the model I got. Mine had 512Mb RAM, but I had two spare 512Mb DIMMs lying around from Hirilonde's upgrade (I paid $170 and got two 1Gb DIMMs to max it out). Hirilonde had 1Gb and a 40Gb HD (for $1500), but I put in another $320 and upgraded it to 2Gb and a 100Gb HD.¹

The video card is a little bit low-end, but it seems to have fair performance under WinXP Pro SP2. Have you been using it for playing DVDs much?

I don't expect to be playing a whole lot of games on this one; the "ubercomputer" I've been wibbling about, a desktop PC that I'm building in August (budget $4000, $6000 including dual 19" LCD monitors and peripherals), will be more than adequate for any gaming I might possibly have time for.

Is there anything to TruLife besides the anti-glare feature? My screen is just a regular WXGA 15.4" one - I have it on 1280 x 800 at the moment, which feels a little low to me, but then, Hirilonde is WUXGA and I have it at 1920x1200. People always warn me about going blind from the tiny fonts. I do appreciate Firefox's nice font scaling, though; when I first got Hirilonde, Dell had everything factory-set to stretch fonts and images, and most rendering (especially JPEG) was blocky.

¹ Sorry to be pedantic, but I should mention that we generally say "storage", "disk" or "(hard) drive space" rather than "memory" when referring to disk. "Memory" almost always means primary memory, i.e., RAM.

--
Banazir

DVDs are good. That's the primary intended function other than as a web client and a hypermedia editor (esp. HTML using Dreamweaver and images using Photoshop).

Re: TruLife - I was just wondering whether you sprang for a resolution upgrade. What's the highest res you can get, please? My E1505 is advertised as being capable of 1920x1200, but it only goes up to 1280 x 800 here. I'm assuming that it was listed at a higher res than it can really get, based on looking up WXGA in Wikipedia before buying and comparing that against WUXGA.

I had meant to say "we in IT" but forgot to put that in. Consider it to mean "on dit", though; no exclusivity intended. :-D

As for technophilia in a technophobic line of work - you don't say? I have to remember that the room of notebook computers is a figment of Legally Blonde (well, maybe the real Harvard classroom, too; I don't know).

--
Banazir

OOoo oooo, that's what I want to hear; my emachines laptop got declared a lemon and the store is letting me replace it with anything so long s I pony up whatever's more than the equivalent laptop - and I was thinking of going with a Toshiba that has the T2400 processor (basically the same as the T2300 as far as I can tell, just a teensy bit faster at 1.83GHz instead of 1.66GHz).

I haven't used any of the Centrinos (let alone their dual core ones) and was a little nervous that going from the AMD64 4000+ that's in my soon to be former laptop would be a significant drop in speed...

It took me a quick Google to understand that acronym, but cool.

You seem to have a masochistic slant, what with all your Vista tinkering. ;)
A slant? I do believe I am the archetype of the phrase hardcore kernel sub. zengeneral once advised me, after I told him about my OS troubles, to find an attractive young woman who owns a whip.

--
Banazir