Bestbuy was running 18 months same as cash on laptops. I picked up a Compaq, athlon xp 2800, 512mb RAM, 40GB hard drive for $1150 with a $300 mail-in rebate. That's a pretty decent laptop for the price! I plan on using it for sales presentations and product demos. The geek in me wants to upgrade it to 1gb ram, but the realist says I don't need it for what I'm using it for. We'll see who wins that battle. =)
First thing I did when I got it home was blow the operating system away. Man I hate all that garbage that the big vendors pre-load on your pc. Partitioned the drive, installed win xp pro, then started the long process of installing software.
I had quite a fight with visual studio. The oddest thing happened. I had installed McAfee virus scan and then was installing visual studio 2k3 (it's a no-no to install it while virus scan is running but it was late and I forgot). Sure enough, virus scan caused the install to fail. The rollback failed, and I couldn't restart the install because of some error that popped up (late at night, don't remember). So I do a system restore and try to start again... nothing, wouldn't install.
So now it's really late and I'm pretty irritated so I decide to just blow the machine away again and reinstall visual studio first. Well now the hard drive won't format ntfs, kept getting to 100% then saying there was an error, drive might be bad, whatever. Now I'm really mad and tired to boot. But being the geek I am, I couldn't sleep knowing that my new baby was out there broken. So I tried to format fat 32 on the system partition, it worked. windows xp installed, I booted it into windows, used the command prompt tool to change the fat32 to ntfs (convert c: /fs:ntfs) and long story short got everything installing properly.
What a pain in the arse though. I still don't know how a failed VS 2003 install could hose up the system so badly...