My son starts college in a few days. He has an old Dell laptop that isn't good enough for him, I guess. He wants for his laptop to be his main computer, so he thinks he doesn't want a netbook because of the relative slowness of the processor. We are thinking it would be nice to have either DVI or HDMI output and to have a monitor/HDTV in his dorm room where he can dock his laptop and also use it for TV/movies. On the other hand, if he has a nice TV, does that mean that other kids will be wanting to watch it all the time? They have free HD cable to the dorm rooms (UW-Madison). We definitely want to run Linux (Ubuntu, preferably) and still have everything working properly. He might have to run Windows in a VM, or as a dual-boot setup, but I'm not sure about that (he's mostly concerned that he hasn't been able copy music files to his iPod Touch from Ubuntu, but I'll try some experiments here while he's visiting). Just thought I'd check here to see what kinds of tips and ideas you guys have. It's a tricky decision because of the trade-offs with price, power, battery-life, features, etc. We'd like to keep the price down to $600. Mike