God forgive me, but I bought that DELL 640m laptop today. The special offer they had just for today was just too good to pass. The only additions I made to the default was to get the higher-res screen and the internal Bluetooth module. Overall, this laptop costs $1203 normally, but I paid only $859 because of the -$344 special offer (and with free shipping).
Thom tells me that this laptop won’t last more than 2 years (he has the same casing for his Inspiron laptop and he has already seen parts of it falling apart), but for the price I think it was a good purchase. I made sure that the laptop came with an Intel card instead of ATi/nVidia (for better Linux compatibility) and WiFi. The special offer includes a free upgrade to DVD-+RW drive, 2 GBs of RAM, the enhanced 9-cell battery (instead of the normal 4 or 6 cell batteries) and a 120 GB drive. I like the fact that it has a firewire port, 4 USB ports, Express card slot, S-Video out, SD/MS flash reader. Because I am pretty sure that this laptop won’t last for too many years, I decided to purchase it with a Core Duo CPU instead of a 64bit Core 2 Duo (I saved $125 this way).
Overall, I am very happy with these hardware specs and the 5.50lbs it weighs. The only thing missing from the laptop is an integrated webcam in my opinion. I am looking forward to resizing the Vista Home Basic partition and install Linux there too. Hopefully, this trick will let me enable Aero on Home Basic too. As for Linux, I am toying with the idea of going Ubuntu instead of Arch Linux simply because of the desktop-oriented conveniences that Ubuntu features compared to labor-intense Arch.
Regarding a Macbook, I decided to get one only if my Powerbook dies for good. Until that happens, I will just purchase the Leopard OS for use with my PPC Powerbook when it’s out.