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[slink]

If you're willing to do the buiolding, you can get desktop cases to fit ATX form motherboards. Or you could go even smaller footprint and get one of the little Mac mini size things, but that's started to limit it a bit more.
Certainly, while Vaios are quite nice, and have amazing screens, you are paying a grand or so extra and getting the performance of a machine worth over a grand less. That said, I did everything I could to cover up the evil Compaq logo set into the back of the screen on mine. It's actually raised and it strikes me as really bad design. As well as looking extra gimpy.

[wombat]

Keeping your PC on the floor is the fastest way to kill it.

Why?  Not that I do this, I'm just wondering.

[pmcd9]

My PC has been living on the floor for about 5 years.  It seems to be thriving down there and I don't exactly have the most immaculatly clean house.

~Paul

Edit- Oh wait, it was on the desk for the first 2+ years.  But the top of the desk wasn't all that clean either.

[misterqueue]

Jough's essentially right that the floor is bad news bears for the pc, mostly because of dust.

However I have a ginormous tower on my main pc that can't fit anywhere else and I find as long as I vacuum it out every other week there are essentially no problems.  So I just threw that into my vacuuming routine and called it a day.

[pmcd9]

Vacuuming?

~Paul

[misterqueue]

Indeed.  You'd be surprised how sluggish a pc filled with dust can get.

[jough]

Actually, HEAT is the killer of PCs, but dust happens to be a really good insulator.  Also, dust can get in between electrical contacts and make things break.

It is a bad idea to keep a PC on the floor.

The problem with the small ATX type of PCs is that the components are mere novelties now and thus are actually more expensive than just buying a system at Best Buy (a big consumer electronics chain in the States) or something.

I'm going to look more into a small desktop system, but I do like the compactness of a laptop - I just hate the closed-box system that I can't just open up and vacuum out every other week, or fix something stupid like a power supply when I need to. This having to be without a decent PC for ten days because I have to send the whole thing back whever ANYTHING goes wrong is a pain in the arse.

[misterqueue]

Actually, HEAT is the killer of PCs, but dust happens to be a really good insulator.  Also, dust can get in between electrical contacts and make things break.

Pedant.

[wombat]

Actually, HEAT is the killer of PCs, but dust happens to be a really good insulator.

I guess the same goes for cat hair.  Which is just as much on the desk as on the floor.  But the floor also has dog hair, so it's worse.

[jough]

Thank you to everyone for your replies.

I decided to NOT go with a laptop and instead build a miniATX box that is somewhat larger than a mini/shuttle PC but smaller than a full desktop or tower.

It will be nice to buy components peacemeal and then assemble the PC.  Also, future replacements should be less painful and easier than the laptop, which sucks because if ONE thing breaks I have to send the whole dang thing in to the service center for repair.

I'm going with a very snazzy little case, upon which will sit a ViewSonic 19" widescreen LCD. 

Inside it will ROCK YOUR WORLD with an AMD X2 4200+ dual core processor, 2Gb of memory, a 250Gb Seagate Barracuda HD, a fast DVD+/-RW burner, and possibly an ATI x800XL/256mb RAM video card, although that may have to wait until next month.

The whole system will come in at just around what I paid for this low-end laptop, and will be much faster and will kick so much more ass.

Of course, it'll be less portable.  There are trade-offs here, people.

[slink]

See, now you will have a real computer! Isn't it wondrous?
I have looked a few times at the tiny little miniATX cases, as there's a place near me sells them dirt cheap, but it would be a hugely less powerful system than my second tower, so it just doesn't seem worth it. It would be quieter though...

[jough]

Slink,

I opted not to go with the super-mini cases, but rather just a microATX which is about the depth of a mini-tower but only 9" high, and about twice as wide. So it's just a desktop case, essentially.  The physical volume of the case is actually fairly large, and it has expansion for two hard drives (I already have three external USB2/Firewire drives), two 5.25" drives and a 3.5" bay in the front, two full-sized PCI slots, a PCI express, and a PCI Express x16 for a video card (which I'll also be adding).

I ordered one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811144162

Anyway, my laptop was actually a fairly decent machine - it had a desktop Athlon 64 processor, large hard drive, burner, 1280mb RAM, 15.4" WXGA display, etc.  But it tended to overheat and then things broke. 

I'll probably set up a partition for SUSE Linux on the new system.  I've gotten to really like KDE as I've been using it from a Linux Live CD while waiting for the new hard drive to ship (it probably won't be here until Friday).

It'll be nice to have a modern GPU though.  The laptop is a 2-year old model now and the graphics card they put in it was a year or two old when it came out.  It's only DirectX 7 compatible.

And I'm looking forward to being able to upgrade little by little like I did with my old desktop system back in 1997, which was the last time I didn't have a laptop.

I'll probably sell this one once it's repaired and buy something smaller to travel with.  It's a monster system for a laptop but it's huge. 

I'm very excited, though, and am hoping that I'm not wasting my money with a dual-core X2.  The chip I ordered came in third or fourth in the extensive Tom's Hardware Guide benchmarks this year, and the only ones faster cost several hundred dollars more, so I think I made a good decision.  The thing will of course be obsolete by the time I assemble it.

[slink]

I don't know about the dual core and how worth while it is at the moment. I had the same thoughts when I stumped up the extra cash to get a larger on die cache when I moved to 64 bit. I have no idea how much it might help with any of the things I do, but... Ah well.
Hell, is 64 bit enough of a gain to be worth while?
But certainly the desktop chip in my Compaq is prone to getting awful warm. Hasn't actually overheated but it's most certainly dangerous to the crotch.

The thing that makes me stick with a dekstop would be the upgrade feature. And avoiding Macs...
If I were to buy a new laptop I would go with something lower spec but lighter. My mom bought a new Toshiba recently that is about 2.5 kilos. It's awesome!

[jough]

That's probably what I'm going to do eventually - keep the desktop for video editing, everyday work, burning DVDs and stuff, and then get a thin and light laptop for travel.  Right now I actually use my PDA for a lot of things that I used to use a PC for while on the go - email (reading only), daily web reading, watching movies and tv shows, playing chess, etc.

The 64 bit advantage won't be evident for a few years.  I actually think that applications will work better with multicore chips before they're updated to work with 64-bit chips.  There are a number of applications that already will see a dual-core chip (or even a hyperthreaded one) as two CPUs and spawn threads to each of them, so they can process in parallel. 

Ironically, all of these gamers are buying dual-core chips to play games better, but pretty much every CPU-intensive chip on the market will only utilise a single CPU.

Of course, for games the GPU is more important than the CPU.

[CortJstr]

Well I'll be damned. The Distributed.net client sees my hyperthreaded chip as 2 CPUs and runs in parrallel. I'd never really looked before.