If I were in the market for a new desktop, which I'm not, I would take quick look at the new HP Touch Smart. It comes with a 19" wide screen touchscrren monitor, and is just very, very slick looking. I ran into it at Best Buy earlier tonight and my mouth about dropped open. Also, it's stacked with some hot stuff inside. Take a look at the specs: Processor AMD Turion 64 X 2 Dual Core RL52 with AMD PowerNow and AMD LIVE! Technology Operating system Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium Memory 2048MB PC2-4200 DDR2 SDRAM memory (expandable to 4GB) Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics with 256MB video memory Hard drive 320GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive Primary CD/DVD drive Slot-loaded SuperMulti Drive DVD burner with LightScribe Technology Secondary CD/DVD drive N/A Memory slots 2 SoDIMM (both occupied), HP Pocket Media drive bay (available) Front-access ports 8-in-1 memory card reader, 2 USB , 1 IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port, headphones, S-video, audio (L/R), composite input (analog video/audio) Communications Wireless LAN(802.11a/b/g) with built in WLAN antenna, Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet network interface, Sound Integrated audio, 6 speaker configurable and Built in 12W 2.0 speakers Monitor Touch Enabled 19" diagonal BightView LCD with height and tilt adjustment, Aspect Ratio 16.10 Dimensions 18.88(l) x 21.77" (w) x 11.37 (d/h) Web Camera Integrated 1.3 megapixel webcam with built in array microphone Personal Video Recorder NTSC TV Tuner and over the air ATSC high definition television tuner The price is $1799 Here is a link that might be useful: HP Touch Smart

My toshiba battery stays in full time even while on ac power which it is almost 24/7... only use battery power maybe an hour, three times per week. Battery, even though installed, does not receive any charge until it dips below 95%. Battery is located in a cooler area of the laptop so I don't think its getting any appreciable heat. Actually nothing gets appreciable heat excpt my right judo chopper ... that edge of the laptop is the only place I can feel any heat and only occasionally, so probably somthing is working hard when I feel it. Probably about every other month the laptop will run on the battery to discharge it down to around 10% charge level to exercise it, which I think the manual tells you to do - and then it only takes slightly more than 2 hrs to fully charge it. fwiw.. I used to get the daily local newspaper delivered,, I forget, not cheap. But maybe just throwing it out was the main Pia. I still read the same newspaper online, and dont have to worry about throwing the trees the pages are made of away. Nor paying for them. Plus I read lots of other news online. Research my neighors hypocrondiacisim and meds, as well as most everything I buy. I'm supposed to be on a sodium controlled diet, hospital gal told me to try to keep sodium intake around 2000mg per day - if I cheat, she said, with a sub or pizza I can always make up for it by eating nothing but ice cream the next day or two because its no to very low sodium ... How much sodium is in a domino's supreme pizza... wow, thats online - I eat a lot of ice cream. What's on tv,,, go to NASCAR.com, sPEEDTV.com, or yahoo tv guide. Wonder if walgreens has bowls, I keep breaking bowls.. hey thats online... 2 for $1.50 (they used to be 50¢ ea.) I hate shopping store to store, much easier to look online first. That's how I bought my laptop, my tv, search at Staples, OfficeDepot, BestBuy, CircuitCity,, and search online to see if any significant price at an etailer difference. If you can edit video on your desktop, you really dont need anything fancy in a laptop to surf the net or read pdf' files, or do light graphics. I have an old desktop with a decent video card and can edit or do anything on that computer. While its really nice to have a fast everything in a lsptop,,, I really dont need fast video/fast processing on my laptop,, I'm cheap, but that still is a waste of money to me... those type of programs that really need fast video processing or lots of processor power I can still run on any laptop remotely from the desktop,, and it may be a little sluggish - If it is I need to feel fast I can always take over and run the complete desktop remotely with the laptop. Not a big deal here, except I have to go power on the desktop, cause I'm cheap and dont want to leave it running full time and pay its power bill of 130watts x 24hrs when its doing nothing but sitting idle on standby.

Any of the ones you mentioned are "good guys" LOL the athlon can be dual core but it would say that it is or have the x2 beside it for dual core or the x4 for quad core. Here is a link to what is called a benchmark chart for various processors it might help you get an understanding of how they are rated by performance of certain types of tests. CPU Models as you can see they are also divided as to high end, mid and low end. and yes that one is an ultra thin version. AMD Athlon Neo Processor for Ultrathin Notebooks I have no personal experience with those exact ones so can not give you that kind of info, I do have AMD athlon processors in 2 of my windows machines and in a laptop, all of which have been excellent. In my netbook I have the little Intel Atom processor which is a pretty small processor but does well with the little netbook. the athlon is in both 32 and 64bit but any spec details from the pc will tell you which it has in it, if you do not find that info on the specific site you are on try googling the model number of the pc and you can then look at it on different sites which do give better specs. Sites like newegg, tiger direct, and amazon are pretty good about having a tab on the info page with the full specs details. If it is a new pc that is being offered with windows 7 64 bit it will be 64 bit Here is a link to the AMD site with the various choices and the info about them AMD Processors for Notebook PCs your choice with the dual core would mean that it has 2 processors so it can do the processing work much faster since it has 2 that it can spread the work to. If it were a quad core it would have 4 processors and be virtually twice as fast as the dual core. So in the ones you listed your dual core choice would/should be the faster.

I thought I had upgraded to IE7 at one point. Yahoo wants me to upgrade to IE8, but after reading about it here, I was reluctant to do so. I did go to windows updates last week to see if there were any I needed to do, but after scanning it said there were none. How do I get IE 7?