With the kids needing the family PC more and more for home-work and my need to be a bit more mobile, I broke down today and bought a laptop. The purchase is a bit of a long story but let's just say that all I wanted from the millenial employee at BestBuy was to get my HP out of stock. Instead, he tried to send me to the Dell on-line store .

I got a 17" wide-screen, dual-core, 1.9 GHz with 2GB of RAM and 160GB HD, 4 USB ports, 5-in-one reader, remote, GEForce video card, integrated web cam and stereo mikes, integrated wireless and 10/100 ethernet for a grand Canadian. I remember having bare-bones Dells for $1500 at corporate rates. And this is actually a very sleek and good-looking machine when compared to Dells that sell for 50% more.

So I had a look at it in the store and noticed that I'd be in for a lot of tweaking given all the garbageware that was installed and all the services that were running. I had no experience with Vista but I was glad to find this. When I first got it, it was consuming 850MB of RAM quiescently. After I got rid of the garbage and made the tweaks, I was down to a reasonable 480 MB which is actually almost identical to my XP desktop. And although I didn't run any benchmarks, performance was much snappier too.

Now I need to decide whether or not I should install Office 2K. Does anyone have any experience with this version Office on Vista?

Office 2K? eek! Yes, all programs except Outlook will work well with Vista.

Thanks.