Hi !
Having bought Dells for 3 years I decided that the best value for money versus performance could be obtained elsewhere.
( By the way, my personal experience with Dell has been very good, their products are first class and so is their support in as far as RMA parts exchanges, telephonic assistance leaves something to be desired however as this has been outsourced to India, overall it is still the best support in the industry. )
I opted however for the cheaper alternative and buy 3rd party manufactured laptops using Desktop solutions.
These give you the best performance and the best value for money, the only negative side is product support and battery life, the real positive is upgradeability, generally they use CLEVO motherboards, the latest incarnation of which will support desktop CPU upgrades to 3.2 Ghz including hyperthreading enabled BIOS updates generally on a 533 or 800 mhz front side bus, pc 333 or faster ram and modular micro video cards.
Of note is the fact that a lot of manufacturers of laptops, I cite two in particular : Hewlett Packard and Compaq are reverting back to shared memory architecture on-board video, not only is it crap but it cannot be upgraded and who's principal intention, while at first offering good value for money, requires the user to purchase an entirely new laptop 12 to 24 months down the road when newer software requires more system resources currently left over after the video robs your ram and/or direct X 9.0 extensions and or the latest incarnation thereof, currently not supported.
After shortlisting about 20 different manufacturers and on-line retailers of laptops I have found the best value to be SAGER or PROSTAR and there is one more from whom I have ordered my latest laptop:
www.expressnotebook.com
When buying, look for a good display, I always opt for UXGA 1200 by 1600 pixels, I have also found anything less than a 16 Inch display on a laptop screen with a higher resulution as above is hard on the eyes.
When buying a laptop using a " DESKTOP " CPU solution, opt for INTEL over AMD, ( these are regular desktop processors and do not support speedstepping or mobile technology hence the higher drain on battery life, however they are substantially cheaper and I have still been able to get over 90 minutes of use out of a battery running a word processor and or music application)
The reason behind opting for INTEL CPU's in this case is that both AMD and INTEL Desktop CPU's run " hot " when used in a laptop who's cooling solution is not as adequate as in a more spacious desktop environment, Intel have an on-die thermistor who's function controls two types of thermal protection: throttling of the CPU by generally 50 percent although this may be adjusted if your BIOS Version allows and, overheat shutdown prior to CPU damage if for example the cooling fan were to fail, AMD does not directly support this protection and this feature may or may not be available depending on the motherboard which may or may not provide an on-motherboard thermistor close to the CPU and temperature protection, if available, will be controlled through the BIOS or through windows via a control applet.
Note: I had a mate who experienced a CPU fan failure on an AMD based laptop and it was junk shortly thereafter as it required replacement of the processor and motherboard.
When opting for RAM, go fastest and mostest, Desktop based laptops are currently using 333 or 400 DDR Ram, a faster option not available as standard on say a DELL " mobile " laptop.
In addition most laptops have beween 2 and 4 RAM slots, check to see how many DIMMS make up the memory you are buying, for example if your laptop supports over a gig of ram but has only 2 slots and your standard memory is 512 using 2x256mb dimms you will have to get inventive and/or sell off one or more of the original memory sticks in order to upgrade, your best bet is a 512 ram module occupying one ram slot, leaving the other free for another 512 should you need it down the road.
CPU size is optional, like I mentioned before, the upgrade is a simple affair, normally 4 screws underneath will allow for the removal of the panel, 4 more screws allow for removal of the " thermal unit " this is the heatsink and fan combo as one unit and the CPU sits underneath in a ZIF socket which has a small locking lever, operate the lever , remove the CPU, insert the new one, re lock the lever and replace the thermal unit and panel, also a good idea to use a little thermal paste between the new CPU and heatsink.
Video card upgrade is a little more involved but just as routine.
I mentioned value for money, I paid exactly $800.00 US less for Prostar, desktop based laptop, with slightly faster Specifications than the Dell Inspiron 8500 I had been looking at last year.
This year I'm buying a SAGER based laptop and saving about a grand, small price to pay for the loss of battery life and I like the upgradeability factor, should be able to keep my new laptop in the top of the range for at least 24 months and competitive for36 to 48 prior to needing to buya new one. ( Generally laptops double in performance every 12 months, as a footnote when the Intel Pentium 5 is released, it will probably use a new " form factor" or socket, this will dramatically lower the price of pentium 4 based CPU's and allow for a much cheaper upgrade for you in the next 12 to 18 months.
Good Luck !!