I am not much of notebook expert myself. I own my first (Dell Vostro) for less than a year. :) But I do have plenty passing through my hands for initial setup and occasional fixes/cleanups.

I think hardware is at point where pretty much any modern PC (maybe excluding netbooks) can handle office stuff. As result people care less about specs and more about design, mobility and price ratio.

So subj has lowest possible price, decent design and usability but ugly heavy. :) It might work well as simple desktop replacement model for work.

I’d like to have a laptop/notebook so I could take what I jokingly call my work with me when I go out of town and not be pining too badly for my lovely desktop. This could work for me. It has all the elements I care about: good, large screen, a keyboard, and whatever else is under the hood that makes it run :) For this, I wouldn’t really care about multimedia.

As for pre-loaded crap, I learned from my last couple of computer purchases (believe me there was a long pause between the two) the best solution is to fork over the extra $ for your very own copy of whatever OS you want, wipe the hard drive of your new darling and start over. Cleaning up an OEM OS is a struggle I never want to engage in again. Murder is the best solution.

AMD was for once on top with Athlon64 but when it crashed – it crashed hard. Choice of AMD-based notebooks is very poor around here, even with over-saturated lineups (I read for all brands combined we have like ~2k notebook models on market, it is total mess).