Last week, I went out laptop hunting. My 3-year old Sony Vaio was on it's last legs and I needed a replacement. Turns out it was the perfect week - Best buy was clearing out the old models to make room for the new ones the Studio XPS 1330 I'd been looking at for a couple of weeks was on sale. It was the floor model, and I ended up paying $649 for it, but I'd have bought it anyway at the clearance price of $809.

With 4 gig of ram, and a T8400 Core 2 Duo processor, It's blindingly fast. I'm not wild about the combo DVD/CR slot-drive - it's a tight fit and if you use paper labels on your disks, some of them may not play. I'm also not wild about Vista. This unit came with the 64-bit version and while I expected some hardware and software incompatibilities, I wasn't prepared for the number: My Canon scanner doesn't work. Neither does my HP Wide-format printer. And despite downloading the new Windows Mobile Device software and 2 days of effort, I cannot get Vista to recognize my Treo 750w.

The Studio XPS 13 is a great laptop. Highly recommended.