One gotcha on Mac books is lack of a 9 pin serial port, which can be a real show stopper if you are going to do configuration of network equipment (Switches, routers, etc...) So you'll want a USB serial port adapter thing. My coworker has a 17" Mac Book Pro. All I can say is: luggable. The thing is huge. It's not a laptop you will want to use in a coach airline seat. Battery life seems really good for a "laptop" of this size. I use a Dell Latitude D610, and the more I have to lug it around the more I want to get a smaller laptop next time. We've gotten a couple Latitude D420s in and they are very nice little laptops. Like the Mac Books the D420 lacks a serial port. It also lacks an internal optical drive. You can get the media base, which is a portable docking station thing with the optical drive and some extra USB, video, etc. ports (similar to ultra portable Thinkpads) or you can get the D/Bay option which is an external optical drive that connects via the D420's powered USB2 port. I've setup the media bay and the media dock, and my personal preference is the D/Bay. With the D420 a D/Port docking station and large LCD monitor are a must for your "home base." I haven't played with Linux on the latest Dell laptops, but I didn't have too many issues when I tried a Knoppix CD in my D610. D620 and D420 use the same video, network, etc. devices as the D610 (newer revisions harder, need latest drivers, but at least I only have to maintain one version of the driver for these systems.) If you're thinking Linux + Dell, make sure you pick the Intel option for wireless, not the Dell branded option. With Parallels Desktop on Mac I've noticed some downright flaky network behavior in the Windows XP guest OS. For whatever reason the WinXP guest will not run an install over the network (using windows file sharing), even if it's a very small (under 5mb) install. If you copy the install files from the Windows share to the WinXP Guest's Hard Drive, everything works fine. Besides that issue Parallels has worked very well and it's impressively fast. The Parallels network bug would be a show stopper for me. I use VMWare to test automatic network installs all the time. If you're using Parallels just to run Windows or Linux to use Windows/Linux specific programs you should be fine. If you go the BootCamp route you'll want to setup your dual boot Operating Systems right away when you get your Mac. If you start using your Mac it's possible that your hard drive could be come too fragmented for BootCamp to repartition your hard drive for the BootCamp operating systems. If this happens, you pretty much have to reinstall OSX before you're able to use Boot Camp. -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned