Ditto the most recent post. Stick with a 15.4 inch screen on the gaming laptop. Trying to push 3D games to a 17-inch screen just means you have to turn down more settings. I'm currently typing on a Dell Inspiron 1705 that I bought from the Dell Refurb site with a Core 2 Duo and an nVidia 7900GS video chip. It plays pretty much anything well enough but I wish I had the lower resolution to speed it up just a hair more. On this machine I've gone through Quake 4, Clive Barker's Jericho, and Two Worlds, but ran them at low settings. I'm also playing in the Battlefield Heroes beta and it runs just fine (it's a lower-requirement game though). My suggestions: make sure to get a Core 2 Duo, not a "Pentium dual core" or an AMD CPU. And of course make sure it has dedicated graphics. If you go to Newegg.com and look at Laptops/Notebooks you can use the filters in the left sidebar to show you all of the laptops that have a Core 2 Duo and a Dedicated graphics card. The whole first page of results fit your budget and there are several models with nice 2.40 Ghz Core 2 Duos with several video options. I'm not familiar with how well the new ATI 4xxx series laptop graphics are holding up against the nVidia 9xxx series.

... Hudey123 ...

The problem with this is that if they miss that mark (let's say they post a 50 percent rise, or 39 cents per share), even though they *still posted a rise* their stock will fall because they "didn't meet analysts' estimates". The stock market sucks. It's controlled by too much institutional trading and big money investors. Too bad we really don't have a way to increase our retirement pot except for "playing" it.

... Hudey123 ...

Keep them! I invest in gold as well, for the long haul. Realize that in 1980 gold was only *marginally* less expensive than it is now. People are just starting to realize that if the price of gold was like *anything* else it should have risen to somewhere between $2500 and $3000 per ounce today. Combine that with deteriorating world market conditions and dwindling gold supply, and I think we'll see those numbers in the next 20 years.

... Hudey123 ...

touche!

... Hudey123 ...

Check about a third of the way down on this page for the bold headline that begins with "I download a large 30 minute video from Youtube..." http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/10-interesting-things-you-can-do-with.html It points to a command-line FLV splitter, not sure how good it is though... Hudey123

... Hudey123 ...

Tesla still rocks! I live in a small town on the Central Coast of California and at the Mid State Fair last summer Tesla played two shows on a free stage, so me and a couple of buddies grabbed a brew, took a seat and relived our high school years. The best thing about Tesla is that they're still having fun on stage and they don't take themselves too seriously. They make jokes about their time in the limelight, but I think they really prefer where they are today (wives, kids, real lives). We loved the concert, and I'm sure you will too!

... Hudey123 ...

Newegg.com is king in my book!

... Hudey123 ...

More musical infection for y'all... He put the lime in the coconut and mixed it all up... He put the lime in the coconut and mixed it all up... :)

... Hudey123 ...

No question ... Swedish Chef! Especially the episode where he cooks a shoe and calls it "a-meat a-loafer". :)

... Hudey123 ...

Where are you shopping? A search for USB KVM at http://www.newegg.com turns up 140 results, some of which are adapters but many of which are anywere from low end to high end rack-mount KVM switches that support USB.

... Hudey123 ...

At work (Flash/Web Developer/Designer) I would not move to Vista yet. There are too many hardware issues, bad drivers, and software incompatibilities to worry about. At home, I just upgraded to a Dell Inspiron E1705 with a Core 2 Duo T7400, 2Gb RAM, and an nVidia 7900 GS. I'm running Vista Home Premium with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on and not having a single problem. I understand the comments about navigating the UI, but I'm a firm believer in the fact that you have to go through some growing pains in the short term to see productivity gains in the long term. I think the nagging issues with the way Vista's UI works will slowly be worked out and in the long run Vista will be a very good OS. And regarding the sales numbers, there are two items to consider: 1. These numbers are solely accountable to PC Manufacturers putting Vista on all new PCs. They're not high because boxes of Vista are flying off the shelves of Best Buy and Costco. 2. For a home user, Vista is FANTASTIC. If you're not coding, wrestling with file transfers across a network, or trying to build 3D worlds using high-end graphics cards and powerhouse 3D rendering tools (and finding the right combo of equipment and drivers to do it), Vista is friggin great! For web browsing, listening to music, watching movies and videos, and editing your stupid MySpace page it's a two-fold improvement over XP.

... Hudey123 ...