Thought I drop a few parting comments before this thread dies: 1) I'm fond of Dell machines - both laptop and desktop. One of the reasons is their superb support program. Yeah - you've got to pay for it up front. Still better than not having it at all. My real reason for liking Dell's support program so much is that I rarely have to get involved on those few occasions when a friend or colleague who purchased a Dell machine on my recommendation has problems - they and Dell support seem to be able to sort out the problem easily. 2) I've becoming quite fond of HP laptops. I recommended a couple of machines to friends last fall (sudden need arose - no time available to wait for Dell machines to be built and shipped). Things I liked about the particular 17" widescreen models we picked: 2 hard drives, 2 PC slots (1 PCMCIA, the other is the new Express card slot), great battery life, replacement keyboard readily available. I had to work on one of those machines recently - friend exercised bad judgement when clicking on a particular link. Was easy to pull the drive go get all of her data off. Not as easy as a Dell laptop but darned easy nonetheless. 3) Also recently spent some time messing with a recent IBM Thinkcentre desktop machine. Obviously designed and built for Corporate use but easy to work on and with. Nice machine, actually (M50 series 8189). 4) Have also spent much time recently with my hands inside standard "white box" machines built from parts gathered from various suppliers - both machines that I put together as well as machines put together by others. Some of these machines had problems that make me wish that the owners had purchased Dell machines so that Dell support could deal with the self-inflicted problems instead of me . My original opinion still holds: if someone is well-enough off to afford a Dell machine and accompanying service contract, I fully recommend that they go that route rather than almost anything else. I'm open to alternatives but so far, Dell looks like the best bet. YMMV dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax Celebrating 22 years of Engineering Innovation (1984 - 2006) .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .- `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' Do NOT send unsolicited commercial email to this email address. This message neither grants consent to receive unsolicited commercial email nor is intended to solicit commercial email. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist