A couple of months ago I bought my first laptop, a Dell Inspiron 4000. I love it. Its fast and stable,good sound, ATI mobility 8mb vid card,fast HD,has well designed ports for ethernet, dial modem, s-video out, etc. and comes with full OS CD, as well as dell reinstall CDs (one for other preinstalled programs, one for system files)and comes with full CDs for office XP, winDVD, etc. I ended up installing Win98 SE because i hate winME.. but that was just a personal choice. However, if u decide to buy one, and plan to ever network it, pitch in the extra bucks to get the dell supported ethernet card / modem combo as they will not be able to help much with non-dell NIC support. Good luck!