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Well my 3.5 year old Inspiron 9100 crapped out and I think its time for a new notebook. That sucker weighed 12 pounds!

My old old laptop was an Inspiron 9000 so yeah, I know exactly what you mean!

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It was a great at the time because I had basically wanted a portable gaming machine but now the priorities are a little different. I'm looking for something pretty small, in the 12-13" screen size range. Basically I'll be using it for general nerdish computer use. It should be able to play older games (such as BF1942, BF2) but I'm pretty sure most of the models I'll be looking at will be able to. Other main criteria are a nice screen and lots of ram.

I bought an aircraft carrier deck sized VAIO in the mean time but the features you listed are what I look for now. My work laptop is a slim VAIO SZ-3HP and it is pretty nice. Small, light, mostly made out of metal, very nice screen and a Core 2 Duo.

I say get 2GB of RAM at least. Vista on 1GB is going to suck. Unless you're running 64 bit Vista then don't bother trying to install more than 3GB of RAM. It won't work.