A great laptop for the price. Under Vista home premium, it seems painfully slow. Sitting on the desktop with nothing open still uses 1.25 Gb of RAM. Under a non-lean install of Debian with KDE, having a terminal with 3 tabs, iceweasel/firefox with 5 tabs (including flash) and evolution with 9 accounts uses only ~500 Mb of RAM. The big screen looks great. Some people make be scared off by the size/weight of the computer. I came from a lightweight IBM T42 thinkpad (one of the last before Lenovo bought the thinkpad line), and holding the laptop on my lap I can feel a difference, but when its in a laptop bag over the shoulder you don't notice any difference.

A cheap powerhouse machine. The 4 Gb of ram and dual core 2.1 Ghz AMD are powerful. The wireless card only works with ndiswrapper at present, it doesn't work with the b43 module that recently made the kernel. The built in Nvidia and Altec Lansing make both the video and audio great. It is a heavy beast, but the 17" display is well worth in. With the nvidia driver, you can get 1440x990 resolution. I have Debian Sid installed, and I have everything working, including sound, wireless, video, microphone, dvd burning, and the camera. The only thing built in that doesn't work for me was the lightscribe. They have a .deb and a .rpm installer, but no source. Unfortunately, they only have 32-bit installers. trying to install it on 64bit immediately throws an error that the package doesn't match the OS.

For a little over $920 in the US, it is a ton of power for a very little comparative cost.