Most of the Live services, especially Hotmail.

You don't actually create web pages, do you?

Nope. My productivity and stress level are important. Linux sucks as a desktop. Windows sucks in a different way. I use OS X because it's a well designed operating system. Manufacturer doesn't play fair? Then neither do I.

Any of the multitouch macbooks allow you to place two fingers down and click the lower button to right click. The unibody MacBooks with everything being the button, just push down with two fingers to make the right click.

Look, I know it's not ideal, but those laptops have a huge trackpad, and the whole trackpad is a button. You click, it clicks. You click with two fingers down, it right clicks. You configure the click on the right hand side, it'll right click. It's not like you're stuck with one button forever -- the advanced users will do what they want to do, and Apple provides that.

I wasn't saying all PC laptops are two inches thick. In fact, I use a ThinkPad, and it's right around an inch.

I speak of the type of laptop that has a RAID setup for its hard drive(s). The airflow and space necessary for that kind of setup destroys the idea of a 'thin and light' category, unless you're talking SSD.

(Also, to be pedantic, a small screen and small size does not make a netbook, unless the Vaio TZ is now a netbook.)

Note, I don't own a MacBook right now, as they also don't make the laptop I want, having everything to do with display resolution and chiclet keyboards.

The MacBooks have a decent touchpad, it's the button layout you don't like. Any laptop with a RAID setup is automatically going to add weight and thickness. Yes, you can position two drives side by side, but you still have an airflow problem, which means more thickness, more fans, and less battery life. My guess is that the day that Apple puts two drives in a laptop, it'll be a SSD and a spinner, because that's the only way the airflow and battery life will pan out.

You are completely not their target market. Apparently, you want a two inch thick laptop that runs Linux and KDE. There are plenty of them. Buy them.

A different UI, yes. A nice UI? Not so much.

They could benefit from the experience at Oracle, and maybe add a few engineers to the team that understand "data integrity" and "don't corrupt data when the server dies", oh, and, "stop corrupting the database when the disk runs out of space".

I actually knew someone who worked for that anti-spam company, and know exactly what you're talking about.

T-Mobile and Danger were partners long before Microsoft ate Danger up. It's not like Microsoft had a history of failed backups and horrible transitions.

Probably something brand new out of a chicken.

The Value Line lacks the nice ThinkVantage tools like System Update, gets rid of the Trackpoint in most cases, the spill free keyboard in most cases, and the keyboard and trackpad aren't as good. As much as I enjoy saving money, playing with a VL for a few minutes convinced me to continue buying ThinkPad.

ThinkPad has the hotswap bays, excellent Linux support, excellent hardware support and turnaround from the factory, and there's always a 20% off coupon floating around. You can get a T series laptop with discrete graphics and well equipped for that $1,200 you're willing to spend, and probably far less. Not only that, but you generally get higher resolution displays than you get with Dell or Gateway laptops.

As for your Windows 98 installs -- why not use VirtualBox?