[Pat Fairbank]

I would recommend against buying a Dell laptop. I bought one last year (an Inspiron 5150) and I'm not satisfied with it, even though it has a fast processor, an excellent video card, and plenty of RAM. A friend of mine recently bought a Toshiba with the same video card, same amount of RAM, and a slower processor, and it runs much faster than mine, even though mine theoretically should be running faster than his. My laptop has also broken down twice in the past four months, and had to be sent back for repairs.

Dell has excellent service and is fine for desktops and servers, and has great prices, but in my opinion Dell laptops are inferior in performance to similar laptops from other manufacturers. I would instead recommend HP or Toshiba.

By the way, I have never had any problems programming the robot with the USB to serial converter I purchased for my laptop, so don't worry too much about getting a laptop with a serial port (just worry about getting a good USB to serial converter).