Yeah, gotta have 15.4 display. Mine is not that heavy. My wife travels a lot for work and she uses a 15.4 size laptop. She's never complained it was to much to carry around.

There is one major item of note with a laptop. It WILL break. If you carry it around, it will break sooner than later. The key here is the warranty. The only reason I stick with Dell is because I am lucky enough to be offered the employee purchase warranty plan. I have used it twice on two different laptops that have paid for the warranty. Everything from hard drives, motherboards, and video screens have been replaced. I always seem to need the warranty right at the 2.5 yr point. I am not that hard on a laptop either but I do carry it around on trips alot.

As far as displays go, the Toshiba Qosmio and the Sony have the best displays in their top of the line models. Dell follows third with their truelife display. Also, you need to choose between a glossy or a matte display. Most people either love the glossy or hate the glossy: there is no inbetween. I myself love the glossy display.

Other than display, you probably do not need a top of the line CPU or graphics card. You do need to get as much ram and hard drive space as you can afford. I think 2 GB of RAM is now the recommended amount.

For operating systems, if you have Windows XP installed, you can install Vista with it. When you go to install Vista, it will ask if you want to keep your XP operating system. You will say yes and then Vista will install. After that, everytime you start your computer, it will ask if you want to start in XP or in Vista. The two operating systems are totally seperate and do not talk to each other in the least. One last note on operating systems: you cannot install XP after Vista is installed (unless you are an expert and know what you are doing at a deep computer level.)

Like I said, it comes down to warranty for me. With Dell, I can call them and have an onsite repair person the next day with parts in hand. With most others, you must pack up your laptop and ship it which endangers it more as well as you being without a computer for weeks on end.

Feel free to PM me with other questions.