I have a lot of experience with Dell. At work we deal with nothing but Dell's.
and just so you know the only difference between the inspiron and the latitude is the pretty letters that say inspiron.
and now my experience ... the faster the processor is the hotter it is. I'm warning you! They get really hot at 1.8ghz! So i recommend a 1.6ghz. the latitudes 840 at 1.8ghz get really hot. The laptops we got these guys i wouldn't be surprised if they start complaining. They weigh 8 pounds!
i will say the setup is automatic pretty much as far as dell. Support is there also. They also have drivers on there website and everything else for you. Their support is good too. Sometimes u still gota wait but you'll have that problem anywhere.
compaqs don't know much about. i will say that they look a lot nicer then dells and a lot lighter i'm sure.
gateways look nice too.
anything else i wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
now dell's are performance and quality which is why they run really hot and are really heavy. They're desktop replacements basicly. But Dell offers a WIDE range of laptops to choose from to keep u happy however. from performance, midrang, light and super light and also mainstream too.
compaq i think has 3 or 4 choices where dell has like 15.
also remember the geforce4 440go on the dell beat out the compaqs radeon 7500 mobile. So if you want performance get Dell. Not concerned about performance? get compaq. also look into gateway too ... don't get an HP! they make awsome printers but not notebooks or desktops. which by the way u will have to go to
www.hp.com, go under ummm the link next to drivers on the left and go to notebooks and choose compaq.
good luck!