I have been in IT building PC's for many many years for my profession, Dell use substandard bits and all the peripherals and sound and graphic handling is done by dedicated onboard systems (usually) they had a hugely bad reputation in the ndustry for using low standard Chinese parts which to a certain extent they still do, I personally would never ever buy a Dell.
2gb memory is pointless in a laptop unless the bus can handle fast memory in my opinion 1gb of pc5300 fast memory will outdo 2gb pc3200 of poorly matched slower memory.
As for the advert from PC World.....the 2gb memory in the add
"DOES NOT provide you with plenty of room to store your photos and CD collection."
As that job is done by the hard drive, of which you need to get one with and SATA drive of minimum of 80gb but the more the merrier! 120gb is pretty standard these days.
Dual core processors are good as they provide future expansion and Vista dual core compatibilty....avoid Celeron processors as they are outdated and being phased out and not as fast as the newer processors, I always go for a good Intel or AMD processor and they are pretty well matched these days.
17 inch screens are nice but add weight to the laptop but can be picked up very cheaply these days, less than £400 inc VAT from DABS or EBUYER.
Vista really is pants, I have instaled it on 10+ PC's now and not one customer has been happy with it and all have requested going back to XP. It has little support for drivers and there are huge compatibilty problems with games and software so for now I would suggest either buying one with XP on or replace Vista with XP certainly until all the teething problems with Vista are healed and thats usually well after service pack 1 comes out.
A bit long winded but pretty much my guidelines when anyone asks for my opinion on Laptops
