Gotta agree with Little Dragon, "Steven" is the best reason not to buy a Dell. :) We may complain about the stability of windows, or Microsoft's "marketing" techniques, but they played a major role in the growth of the PC industry by making PC's easier to use for "non-geeks," which meant more people buying them, more manufacturers making them, and more "bang for the buck" for everyone. My first PC was a 10 Mhz 286 running DOS 3.x, with a 20 Meg hard drive, no speakers, EGA monitor, 512K of RAM, dot-matrix printer, and cost just over $3,000. Now, I can get ~1000 times the performance for a third of that price. For that, I'm grateful.