I've had my new Sony Vaio for around 8 weeks now and so far it's been fantastic. The battery life is poor but you expect that when you buy a laptop with a 17" widescreen.

It has heaps of grunt with a decent size hdd and reasonable RAM also an independent 256MB video card (i don't think this is available with dell models).

Ultimately you'll never get performance as good as a desktop but the better models certainly come close.

My 2nd choice would be a toshiba satellite - they go and go and go.

Cheers,

Allan