Buying a laptop...suggestions?

Hey all,

I'm looking to spend around $2000 on a laptop. Do you have any recommendations? Any brands to avoid?

A friend of mine has a Dell Inspiron 8000 w/ 15" UXGA + Geforce2Go which seems quite nice, but it's HUGE. I've also looked at the ultra portable end of the spectrum. Ultra portables like the Dell Inspiron 2100 & Toshiba Portege are cute, but I'm worried that they will barely meet the minimum requirements to run software in 6 months. Specifically, the Dell has a 4MB Rage Mobility and 256MB max ram. The Toshiba has a 8MB Savage IX & max of 256MB ram. Do you think Win XP would run well on a P3-700, 256MB, 4mb Vram?

Thanks in advance,
Bash

Ultra portables will be fine for some time as long as you can upgrade the memory to 512 and don’t care about games.

Check out the Toshiba 3005-S303. It has a P III 850, 20GB HD, 128MB standard, A DVD/CDRW drive, the Geforce2 go w/16MB od DDR RAM, and a 14.1 inch screen.

Its a modular notbook, so the DVD/CDRW and floppy share the same bay and must be switched out, but this also makes the laptop lighter(around 5.5 lbs instead of 7.5-8 lbs).

This would be a great bet for good performance and low weight, and best of all it retails for around $1700.

Grimwolf