Quote from drsteph:
I purchased a Vostro 15" right at the end of the first quarter when Dell was trying to juice their returns so they were making some nice deals.
Purchased a vostro 1500 running windows XP pro with a core 2 duo T8100 (2.1Gwith 3MB L2 cache), 2G RAM (upgrade to 4G not cost effective through Dell - will do myself), 160GB 7200rpm impact protective drive. Trulife XGA+ screen & webcam (for $20 why not), DVD burner, wifi.
Chose 15" over 17" due to a 4 hour battery life and I just find the 17" unweildy. I rarely open more than 4 charts simultaneously - personal preference, you may need more.
Cost about $820 with discount. Thought that was a fair price.
I primarily run Amibroker. A 65000 step optimization that took forty minutes on my old Toshiba A75 now takes about 6 minutes. I am certain I can get the time down by tweaking, but who has the time?
I think its fine for my purposes, but I don't scalp. Probably ok for a scalper too. This is the first dell I have owned, and I am happy with the build of the Vostro, particularly when comparing to the newer Toshibas, HP, and Vaios which are sexy but notoriously frail.
Will probably go with a Vostro for a desktop set using the E8200 or similar penryn processor in a while as well. Previously used a shop called ABS which has really declined as the clone makers have been decimated (except the high end gamer machines which are just overkill usually unless you are scalping or doing AT with statistical arbitrage, in which case faster = better)
Hope that helps.