Too bad I didn't see this post before we bought our laptop! Although I still think we got a good laptop! We bought our first Dell laptop, because they were having a special sale that allowed us to get a Core Duo processor that was actually in our price range! When we bought this one, the cheapest Core Duo laptop at Best Buy (where I have bought all of my other computers, and I thought I got a good buy on them!) was $1200 and had a 1.6GHz processor. But our new Dell Inspiron has 1.83GHz Core Duo, 1 GB RAM, 100 GB harddrive for about $1100!
Of course, not buying any Microsoft Office products also brought down the price! I can't find the software key for the MS Office version I had on my old computer (Tony do you know how to find it? Opening Word and going to Help -> About just gave us a Word key, not the right number of digits for the Office key). If I can't find the key, then I think we will try downloading Open Office, I had a Linux geek friend in college that swore Open Office was completely compatable with Office...