We ended up choosing something at MicroCenter. It might not be the best choice, but there are so many things to consider and so little time. One interesting phenomenon was that for any brand, there seem to be both strong advocates and ardent detractors. This is probably most true for the biggest brands like HP and Dell. It's hard to know what some of the advice is telling us. For example, how can it be that one person has great luck with every one of a long series of Dells and another person has seven in a row that fail miserably within a few months? I don't know. Are their memories/reports accurate? I'm pretty sure that the laptop is always a crapshoot and even the most reliable manufacturer has a pretty high failure rate (maybe 15%), so that probably explains some of the divergent opinions. I liked the idea of buying a ThinkPad, fixing it up a bit, etc. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time for doing that work, both because of other things we want to do and because he's moving to Madison for school on August 25. I ended up buying a Gateway NV5929u for $600 + tax at MicroCenter. It had most of the features we wanted at a price my son could afford. I wasn't sure of how Ubuntu would work on this machine. I installed 10.04 (Lucid) as a second OS beside Win7. So far, so good. Everything seems to be working in Ubuntu. I can hibernate either Win7 or Ubuntu or both and then choose which to return to, and it works consistently. Sound is also working. One reason I chose the Gateway was that someone (maybe on this list) told me that Gateway and Acer were the same inside. I think Acer works well with Linux, usually, so that made me think Gateway would work too, and I guess I was right because it was as easy an install as I've ever experienced with any OS (which is surprising given that it was a dual-boot laptop installation). The wireless is super-fast: Using http://speakeasy.net/speedtest to Chicago with my new Qwest VDSL2 system and their wireless router/modem ($30/mo right now) and wifi 802.11n, I was getting 34.78 Mbps down and 15.03 Mbps up, which is kinda mind-blowing. That's just Ubuntu 10.04 installation with no tweaking at all -- it just worked. With the ethernet wire, I was getting 4627 KB/s downloads according to Ubuntu's update manager, which isn't far from the 40 Mbps I was promised by Qwest. So I'm pretty happy with Qwest, so far. The thing I worry about with the Gateway is that it might not be very rugged. My son will have to be careful with it, but that isn't always easy for a college freshman living in the dorms. The salesman at MicroCenter told us that for $159 we could have extra coverage for 3 years so that if the computer failed, they would have someone come to his dorm to pick it up and fix it. I read the contract and it said no such thing, as far as I could so, so I didn't buy it (it said that they'd pay for shipping, but I saw nothing about someone picking it up). Mike