I went with a 16 GB SSD and the minimum 512MB of RAM.  I can always upgrade it later, as it will pretty much be a fixture of my living room.  For its purposes, though, it should be more than adequate for now. 

I will make sure to get a longer review up once it arrives.  I am debating reinstalling Windows on it when it arrives just to have XP Professional as opposed to XP Home. 

Running Ubuntu, with 1GB of RAM, and a webcam at around $400.  There is only one thing to say: DO WANT.

I picked up the laptop this evening to resolve the problem, and when I booted the machine I was able to see what the problem was immediately.  I had not had the problem for some time, primarily since it had been a while since I had built the machine.  Essentially, when the machine is booted, the display looks similar to the image below:

The display is garbled and useless.  It took some bit of Googling to refresh my memory, but the problem had to do with a misconfiguration of the xorg.conf file that drives the xserver settings for my laptop.  My Googling turned up the following post: Help with screen resolution on Dell Inspiron 8000.  The problem has to do with how the graphics card in my laptop identifies the driver, an ATI Mobility M4.  Adding the lines in the above post helped correct my problem.

Finally, once I was able to successfully boot into my profile, I was able to easily adjust the resolution of the display panel to 1600x1200.  Nonetheless, I am including the xorg.conf I am using below that appears to be working just as expected.

I spent way too much time than I needed on this, so this should save my (and someone else's) bacon in the future.

I decided to order another desktop from Dell, and here are the specs of the machine:

• Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6550 (2.33GHz, 1333FSB 4MB L2)
• 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz, Dual Channel DT
• Dell 20 inch Wide E207WFP Analog Flat Panel Monitor
• 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 2DVI
• 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive 7200RPM, 8MB Cache
• 48x Combo Drive
• 16x DVD+/-RW Drive

With the time I spent home working remotely this weekend, I was able to build my machine the way I wanted it.  I plan on buying some more RAM from Crucial, simply because getting up to 3 GB of memory in this machine is so much cheaper than getting the machine to ship with it.

Finally, I want to get back to gaming on my PC again.  The one thing that you will never be able to do on most laptops is play a FPS-style of game.   I have a fairly decent graphics card, so I am trying to figure out what games to acquire.  To date myself, I haven't played any decent games since Medal of Honor:Allied Assault, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Doom 3.  Of the three, MOHAA was fun, RtCW was nostalgia (since I played Wolfenstein 3-D in college), and D3 was somewhat tedious but visually good.

As for my laptop, I was thinking what to do with it.  I have an older laptop running Linux I can use around the house when I am lazy.  All it really needs is a PCMCIA wireless adapter, and it is good to go.  I am probably going to give my laptop to my nephew as an early gift of sorts from the family.  He gets something he can use for a while through high school and possibly college.  I just need to make sure he knows to take care of it and to not "show it off."  I think it will be a good thing to get a laptop in his hands, even if it is much earlier than I ever did.

My cellphone is a Motorola e815, and it has integrated Bluetooth.  It is possible to make use of this to enable file synchronization and contact management on the phone.  Even though I have a USB cable, I wanted to make use of the wireless connectivity.  For some reason that I cannot recall, the Bluetooth module refuses to work under Windows XP.  It did initially work, as I was playing with the phone late last summer, but I had some problems getting it to connect to my PC.  Essentially, the two would connect, but the phone did not like the passcode I was providing from the laptop.

Additionally, I know the module is not the problem, as it works under the Windows Vista installation I have on my laptop.  My laptop is capable of dual-booting, and I have a partition running Windows XP and one that runs Windows Vista.   The module works as it should.  Essentially, any of the drivers I have looked at complain about not seeing a Bluetooth device to install a driver for.  If they are installed, though, it complains about a need to turn the radio on, which is clearly the case.  Additionally, the driver asks me to press "Fn + F2," which is unnecessary given that my laptop has the switch on the left of the laptop.  For some reason, Windows refuses to see the device.

On Sunday, I decided to take a crack at seeing how I could resolve this problem.  Nothing I found would resolve the problem.  Reinstalling the driver from Dell is not an easy task, as Dell only shows the TrueMobile 350 Bluetooth module, which my laptop does not have.  I tried just about every solution I could find, but nothing seemed to work.  I even tried a repair installation of Windows XP just to see if I could possibly return the machine to a known state and begin the problem resolution from there.  Nothing seemed to work.  The icon continues to sit in my system tray, taunting me with an inability to see the module.

The one thing I noticed is that module is seen as a Human Interface Device in Device Manager.  According to all other documentation I can found, the device should show up as a Bluetooth Device in Device Manager.  I know the device is working in the BIOS as well, so the problem is exclusively a Windows driver issue.

I really do not relish the notion of flattening my laptop install.  If I have to go exclusively Vista, I may make that leap just to accomodate my Bluetooth desires.   I have yet to see anything online or in the Dell Community Forum that helps me fix this problem.