I've never had a new laptop, unless you count my Nokia 770...
And the most recent of my hand-me-downs just had some screen breakage thanks to the 3 year old...
So the wife and I decided to get a new laptop for "her mothers day gift".
Dell still sells Lattitudes with XP on them, so $800 later (couldn't justify the extra 400 for a mac) we have a D520 with a 15" screen and a gig of ram. Upgrades from the basic one I did was to get the gig of ram (512 is standard) and get the Intel chipset wireless instead of the Dell/Broadcom one. Came with XP home - wish I had waited, since Dell will be selling laptops with Ubuntu already on them, but being the geek I am, this one is already running it
. The new 3d effects with beryl are really cool, and look nicer than anything I've seen about vista/aero from the MS marketing folks, and it hardly uses the cpu/ram. Might be enough to get the wife to Switch.
So, here I am out by the pool, supervising the daughter while she swims and I'm surfin Pelican on my Linux laptop....
Edit- cheesy music in this, but a cool video showing off Aero vs. Beryl.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ