Ah, I went to a lot of stores and looked around and i'm still puzzled.

The Dell Inspiron 8500 is great with a 15.4 screen and is powerful, but the thing looks ugly in pictures. The Compaq EVO1020v or EVO800V are both nice, but for the price of the dell come with a lot less. Toshiba is the best, but the Tecra line I like is like $500 more than a Dell.

No idea what to get....

 

I'm posting from an Inspiron 8200 I grabbed off Ebay for $1000. P4 1.6Ghz, 512M (I added 256), 30G HD, Gforce4ToGo 64M, built in WiFi (pretty good too) 10/100 and a 56k modem, IE 1394 (firewire), CDRW/DVD drive, 2 USB 1.1 and some other jaz. It's not a lightweight portable, but it's a really nice system (assuming you don't stray too long from a plug, only about 2 - 2 1/2 hour battery life.

I used to work tech support for Iomega, I never heard one good thing about Toshiba laptops working there. Some actually had an NEC USB chipset that would not support a zip drive (or a lot of other USB devices). Maybe they've cleaned their act up but I'd probably avoid it. Seeya.