if you mean hard to move as in reference to Vista no it means that Vista is a large program and needs lots of resources to run it, lots of Ram for example, nothing to do with weight. Dual core is the processor most you will find now will be dual core rather than single core. Will be either an Intel or an AMD. This is a quote from Chris Prillo "Dual core refers to the number of processing cores in the processor package. So, in essence, with a dual core processor you actually have two processors. The advantage is that you can get up to twice the processing power. If you do a lot of video editing, photo editing, or run many programs at one time youÂll notice a significant increase in the responsiveness of your system." I would not get less than 2Gig of Ram, and for hard drive I would go for 200GB or larger, the largest you can afford, if you are going with a Vista system go for more Ram 3Gig would be better than 2Gig. If you go with Vista get at least Vista home premium not Basic. If you look at the ones I listed for you above you can get an idea of what to look for by looking at the list of specs for those units. to get an idea of RAM this explains it pretty well it is an older article however. What is RAM?

The first thing I am going to suggest is wean your self off that awful aol you do not need it and will feel so free once you unburden your self from it. Especially with a nice new macbook to play with. You have a nice new mac and are loading it with aol which is from the time of dinosaurs in computer time. everything you do using aol you can do usually easier with out aol. are you certain you downloaded the appropriate version of aol for use with your mac? there are different versions. AOL Desktop this is a really old article I found but it shows a lot of the hookup info some may still apply, I don't know I would not put aol on anything I own. AOL in Mac you may want to try some of the dedicated mac forums online you can find some doing a google search.

The Toshiba A135 received a Very Good rating from cnet. Cnet doesn't give very many $1000 affordable laptops that high of a rating. I recently bought the A135 2877, I believe is the model, the one with 2 gs of mem. (would recommend 2 gigs minimum for vista, from what I hear. It has a 180g hard drive, actually two seperate hard drives, a 100g plus an 80g. Great for backing up your system. With this much memory and hd space, you could collect a sizeable video and audio library (were talking hundreds of songs and movies). It runs Vista flawlessly. Yes, there are faster systems out there. I would have loved one with the Nvidia graphics card, which would give you a whopping 512m of shared graphics memory. The Intel that comes with the A135 has 256megs, acceptable. For about $1100 at costco online, I thinks it's one of the best deals out there. It was about $300 more than I wanted to spend on a laptop, but I'm just thinking where technology is going today, with streaming video, tv and music becomming more and more prevailant, before too long, anything less that 2 gigs of memory and a harddrive less than 100 gigs will probably be obsolete in the next couple years. I think this will be sufficient for our needs for some years to come. -- john

I agree right now if you can keep your old pc working for you and wait till windows 7 comes out you will be avoiding having to purchase any upgrades. It will be out in about a year. If you have any friends that have pc knowledge likely they could easily help you install a new hard drive and some RAM, these are things I do myself but my first time I was pretty anxious. I also agree that the desktop is generally the best option unless you travel a lot and would need a laptop for that. My sister just asked me the same question and I talked her into a desktop pretty quickly, if you have not used a laptop try asking a friend with one to let you try it out for an hour or so, feel how the keyboard feels, see how you like the touch pad instead of a mouse, etc. If you have any problems seeing also consider the smaller screen of a laptop. I have pretty severe hand problems so using a smaller keyboard would be very difficult. Sitting in a chair with the laptop on your lap would require some type of laptop desk so you do not block the air flow. As stated updating and replacing parts in a laptop is much more difficult. One thing you could definitely do also rather than install a new hard drive in your pc is buy a stand alone usb backup hard drive and move all your thousands of pictures and music and other files and data to that hard drive and free up your hard drive in the pc, if you did that and got rid of any old programs you no longer need, clean out any junk files and folders, empty the recycle bin, defrag the hard drive you may find you have plenty of room on that 80Gig hard drive. I have been seeing some incredible prices lately on usb hard drives so you could easily find a nice size one for around $50, and you could use that stand alone hard drive with any new computer you buy in the future. Plus no one would have to install it for you, you just plug it into your usb port and then you can access it from your pc just like your other hard drive. Add some RAM to what ever belarc says is your limit for that pc or at least 2 gig and I bet you would be surprised. RAM is cheap. I just bought a 1gig stick for one of my computers and it was less than $20 shipped. If your current pc is a desktop I would also highly suggest turning it off unplug it and open the side panel up and clean out all the dust bunnies, that can really affect the performance of a pc. Cleaning the computer and its components ecost has some very good prices right now this search is for under $50 units but it gives you some ideas. well now you have lots of options and ways to go and up to you to make that big decision. Here is a link that might be useful: usb hard drives