My new laptop has arrived, almost 2 1/2 weeks before the Dell estimated delivery date. Its extremely nice - very light-weight, with an amazing screen, and best of all is able to use the full Aero interface very nicely indeed with 512Mb of graphics ram (thankfully separate from the main memory!).

My one and only gripe is the absolute rubbish that Dell installs on the laptop, software that the moment Vista loads it requests that you uninstall as it could "harm the stability of Windows Vista" as the software is not "Certified for use on Windows Vista". Its a classic case of Dell installing software that its customers have not requested. Thankfully the new un-install methods in Vista seem to be much faster than under Xp and so after 15 minutes of uninstalling dire software such as:

Google Desktop

Corel Snapfire Plus

Corel Paint XI

Google Toolbar

McAfee Security Centre

MEdia Direct

Microsoft Works

Orance Pre-Load

Roxio Creator Home (Windows Vista has CD/DVD writing built in so why would I need more CD/DVD writing software that crashes all the time!)

Tiscali Internet

Adobe Reader 7 (Adobe Reader 9 is for Windows Vista - so why install version 7!)

Adobe Flash Player 9 ActiveX

Dell Support (Absolute Nonsence if ever the word support is used in the context of an application that adds a good 15-20 seconds to your boot time)

Roxio Creator Audio (CDs can be written using Media Player - much better than Roxio rubbish)

Roxio BDAV Plugin

Roxio Creator Copy

Roxio Creator Data

Roxio Creator DE

Roxio Creator Tools

Roxio Creator Drag-to-disk

Roxio Express Labeler

Roxio MyDVD DE

Roxio Update Manager

URL Assistant

Then a quick trip to the User Account Control to turn it off, and install the required essential applications:

Microsoft Office 2007

Paintshop Pro 9 (Last version created by Jasc before Corel ruined it)

Visio 2003

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express

FolderShare to sync My Documents & Files

....And after just over an hour my new laptop is now ready to use, and starts up in just under 20 seconds.