Pros: Dells Customer support has come a long ways over the last couple of years
Cons: Re-installing Media Center can be a bit cumbersome for someone not familiar with PCs.
The bottom line: thumbs up!
I bought this unit in December of 2006 and it has been a nice low price laptop for family use. I bought mine with the true life lcd which has been very nice for watching DVDs while traveling and the Media Center is useful for my 4 year old who can operate it without having to go into Windows. Mine came with XP not Vista so I can not address the issues others have had with Vista. XP runs just fine although maybe just a tad slow getting started but that is because I purchased it with the slower processor. I have a lot of digital pictures on it and use it for spreadsheets and documents from time to time but not much else. We have a desktop system that serves as our main computer. This one has nice sound quality, real nice video quality, and the screen size comes across as much larger that just a 15 inch because of the true life wide screen format. We had to reinstall Media Center once because my daughter somehow hosed it. I have worked with computers for many years but someone less familiar with them may have found that process difficult. Again, for the price, this is a nice unit.