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Rotating ANY drawings on my laptop is often a painful one. And that's with my bad ass Quadro video card- which is pretty much top of the line as far as workstation laptop graphics go. In my line of work I'm often dealing with drawings that contain tens of thousands of lines. We're talking 1-2 million square foot facilities. Granted many of the facilities are warehouses and hangars (which are not particularly complex), but some aren't. The building I'm working on now for instance is 500,000 square feet, 5 floors, multiple secured areas, LOTS of conduits, man traps everywhere, etc. Anyways, a dual core processor would certainly help me.

-mpjesse

I find Dell... well... Irritating.
They have there good points and there bad.
I'm using a Dell Inspiron 9300 at the moment. Most decked out Lappy (from dell) you could get in australia (recieved it 5-6 months ago).

Its the only Windows XP I've seen give the Blue Screen of death. Its the inbuilt wireless card. Also I cannot use the card reader. Both completely useless.

However, this doesn't phase me because work owns it, lol. its not my money.

yeah its always a bummer when the company gives you a dell or a cheap ibm to expect you to do your job with

i should explain: i have no problem with IBM's stuff, apart from getting given a $700 workstation orientated office PC for use as a graphic-intensive media machine. the accounting people in charge really botched that one... i went to put in a video card one day and whatta ya know, these guys don't keep to industry standard ATX. the motherboard supported PCI-e but didnt have a slot! that's what i mean by cheap IBM

i reckon Dell is the one to watch out for. i have received many upon many of their pamphlets in the mail showing their glorious outdated hardware at all but low prices and crap deals such as pentium D 830 processors equiped in a computer with onboard intel graphics and 512MB of DDR2-533 RAM. i haven't dealt with their customer support or anything as i never normally go for dells. i just see what i see and take from it my opinion.

Personally i willl always take a homebuilt pc over any manufactured one just becuase I know the quality of the pc thats been built. Its just a given. Now back on the real subject at hand, for everyday users, xp home will do just fine, for people who have more than 5 computers at home, or who have 2 chips on their motherboards, XP Pro is the way to go. Now if your using more than 4 chips on a server, then Windows Server 2003 is the next step, as long as your staying within Microsoft. Plus there are 5 different versions of Windows Server 2003, each being able to handle different amounts of CPUs, ram, and storage space. For my money, becuase I am into games, ripping cds, and video editing, and have over 6 PCs on my network, Windows XP Pro is on used on my machines. But as far as his laptop is concerend, it depends on his uses. If your brining it to work and connecting it to a domain with over 10 computers, go with XP Pro, if not, then stick with home. Either way your multi tasking will not suffer. Just remember, if your going to be gaming and going to lan parties, you'll want Pro becuase of the networking capabilities.

Home vs Pro

Dual-Core systems - In time applications will begin to utilize physical multi-core technology, however I feel it may take a few more years (2008) before it really starts to hit mainstream (workstation applications will be second in line to Server apps, then consumer apps)

I worked for Dell for years, I still have many of their products (still buy them too). I'm smart about it... I only buy their laptops. I'd have to say the 9300 is one of the better laptops they've made in a long time (XPS and 9300 are basicly the same beast guts wise except for video card and chassis).

I agree, all large companies have their crappy products... some have their good products. Dell's are not top of the line (nor are alienware) but they are certainly better than Acer or Averatech's junk.

I agree, each manufacturer has good points and bad points, and your right, its going to take time for software to reach that stage where its going to use multicore, although some already have, like Photoshop, and other HIGH END software. Thats why I put my faith in home built machines, but you just can't do that with a laptop, so I would put my faith more in Dell than anyone else. I've repaired laptops for sometime, and Dell is one of the manufacturers that I've seen the fewest problems with overall.

Now as far as the subject at hand, have chosen what your going to do with this laptop, are you going to switch to Pro or not? I'm just saying you've seen the responces, I'd just like to know your descion on it.