Ah yes, almost forgot. Finally grabbed a new laptop to take over for Whitey, my three-plus year old Celeron system I put together "from scratch". Whitey still makes a nice ottoman, and will eventually become my Linux test box, but going from a 533 Celeron to a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 is great, especially when programming in Java using a Java-based IDE.

And to continue my standard Mac hardware bashing, I got the 2 GHz, 20 GB HD, 256 meg RAM, DVD-playing, 32 VRAM-having, 14" screened machine for the same price as the cheapest iBook you can find at apple.com/store. I'm impressed by what I've seen of WinXP so far, and Gateway's done a decent job of rounding out what a typical PC consumer would need with the bundled apps. The battery life isn't nearly as good, and the screen I have now has a busted pixel, but so far I'm impressed with what I was able to get.

I used to think the current model iBook was a good deal, but after using one in the Apple store and using this new Gateway for a day, well, I don't any more.