[daacon]

Thanks for the replies - I will have a look at Toshiba's read good things about them

I currently have a HP 17" it's fine for processing a little slow now - I am not a color perfectionist as a lot of you guys are , in fact I have a red green deficiency so I just want a decent monitor don’t need professional grade

I used to own latitude (C80) - it was built like a rock and lasted a good 4 years until I gave it to the kid’s ha-ha. Don't want to say what it cost back then, let's just say I could get 3 laptops today.

The problem with today’s latitude is once you upgrade the memory, hard drive it's getting over $2k - don't need to spend that much money for the benefits as you say the XPS is pretty well built.

I have travelled with my 17" I am not a road warrior but do get traveling 4 or 5 times a year , airports , hotels. I do use a backpack so I think 15.4 would be fine. My daughter has a 15.4 (last year Insprion model) think it would work well.

Leaning towards the XPS - I will re-look at vista. I run a lot or Oracle products and I think there is support now for oracle and vista. Business or ultimate. I dual boot Vista here now just have not run it for a while (pre SP1) originally ran into way too many issues (oracle, SSH clients, sftp clients, a plethora of VPN clients (Cisco, Citrix, Sonicwall, etc...)

I think the XPS is the leading candidate for now - I can give Vista a shot and always go back to XP not that big a deal (4 or 5 hours to rebuild from scratch)

As for the 3 GB vs. 4 GB you are correct 32bit OS can only address a little over 3 but I thought an application like CS3 could take advantage? It's a pretty cheap upgrade ($100) to go from 3-4 and if I decide to go to a 64 bit OS at some point (be it Linux, Vista or if released before the machine becomes a boat anchor) Windows 2008.