The spouse needed a new laptop so she got an HP Pavillion dv3-1075us.  With 4 gig of ram, Radeon HD 3200, Slot Loading 8x DVD R/RW Double Layer, a 320 GB HD and an AMD Turion X2 RM-72 Dual-Core Processor its a great little 13.3 inch laptop.  The screen is gorgeous (1280X800) and was a great deal.  My only gripe so far is, like most value systems today, it does not come with install media and you only get to make one media set.  I can’t believe they are saving enough money to warrant shipping systems this way.

Our desktop also gave up the ghost so we got an Acer Aspire AX1700-U3700A.  Very nice very cheap.  Intel dual core E2200 processor, 4 GB ram, 640 GB He, 16X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Burner, NVIDIA G100 graphics card with 512MB memory, small form factor.  As above, lack of media is a pain in the neck.  I’ve made my backup disks and am considering flattening the system and installing Ubuntu.