I finally put in that order for the Sony SZ laptop. This will be a VGN-SZ440N14 with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive. Other hardware includes a 22" Viewsonic LCD widescreen monitor and a Wacom Graphire tablet. And a computer desk. I haven't used a computer desk at home since I owned a Commodore C-64.

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx

As I mentioned before, it is the same size as the MacBooks. The advantage with the SZ is that it has better video, an nVidia Go 7400, Yes, it has Intel intergrated video, but you can switch between them.

And it will be running Windows Vista Business. *blegh* God I fear that.

As some of you already know, I have gotten heavily into Second Life. For work in SL I'm getting Newtek LightWave. It was a tossup between that and Autodesk Maya, but friends in SL recommended LightWave. Also Corel Painter for texture work, and Corel Paint Shop Pro for general image editing (along with the Open Source applications GIMP and Inkscape). I'm not interested in getting anything from Adobe. :p Actually, the Wacom tablet comes with PS Elements 3 for free, and I think I'll install it to use with a book on Digital Photography I have. Other software are M$ Office Professional 2007, M$ Project Standard 2007, and M$ Visio Standard 2007. The Office stuff is only to do work-work at home.

All of this is at Academic prices. Yay! Still, not counting the furniture or the monitor, it still comes to over USD 3,500.00. Time to call my State Farm agent to ask for renter's insurance. :/

I'll also be getting a lot of Open Source applications, like GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, etc.

In addition to building in SL, I'm thinking of contributing to the One Laptop Per Child project. They seem to need help with package management, and I think I can help them with that. For that I'll be installing VMWare Player to run Fedora Core AND Ubuntu. :)