Eion: Would you, yourself, still go the way of the Dell?
I would have no hesitation to recommend them. I have an Inspiron 6400 that I bought in 2005 and it is still going strong. Use it every day and even runs windows 7 no problems. Upgraded to 2gb of ram and replaced hdd that died last year and have done nothing else to it. Have to tighten the hinge screws every 6 months or so but they have improved the design since then. Looking at the dell website it seems that prices have gone up over the last 6 months or so. You should be able to get something from there within your price range, might just have to wait and see what specials they bring out. I think they update them every monday?
