I bought a laptop today. It’s a Dell Inspiron 1520 with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz processor, 3GB of memory, 1680×1050 15.4 inch screen, 250GB hard drive, a webcam (that I’ll probably never use), and X3100 integrated video card for $950.

The only thing I wish was better is the video card; however, I’m mainly going to use it to run Aptana along with Rad Rails and Mongrel (Ruby on Rails webserver) and Photoshop so I don’t need a super good graphics card since both of these programs are processor and memory intensive, and I’m staying with Windows XP - Vista needs too much in the way of Video Card processor, and I really don’t care to have pretty windows. I just need it to work, and XP does a good enough job for that.

I custom built my desktop, and although it’s about a year old now, it’s still pretty nice. When I’m playing games, I use that. The laptop will enable me to program from anywhere, and so that my wife can use her Creative Labs Zen MP3 player. The Zen doesn’t work on Windows XP x64, so this is an added benefit. We’ll be able to use the laptop to interface with Zen’s software, and the desktop as a file server for all the music files.