I had a circumstance a few years ago where I was a constant temporary motel resident. One week here, two weeks there, etc. A few times I actually carted the desktop but usually opted for just the laptop. Now bear in mind, this laptop = circa 2003/2004. Well I found that it wasn't a whole lot slower than the desktop. If I dearly wanted a larger screen I could easily plug in a reasonably portable lightweight flat screen monitor. If the keyboard bugged me I plugged in my rubber, waterproof, roll up keyboard. If I felt it was getting too hot I would turn to my temperature monitoring program to confirm or deny - if confirmed, I would turn up the fan (using the same program by the way: Speedfan by almico, found on Download.com) and boot up the underlaptop fan pad I'd gotten. My biggest issue was storage space. My little old laptop came complete with a huge 60 gb hard drive. (Yes, that was a bit of sarcasm there!) If you do photography and even amateur video clips, 60 gb goes not very far. So that was an ongoing problem - until Western Digital came out with those wonderful LITTLE, POCKET SIZED Passport hard drives. I now own oh about a cabinet full of them. Problem now is remembering whats on which one! Anyways though, my roundabout point here is this - Over time, I found I really didn't NEED a desktop computer. And by using the laptop and little hard drives, I could take whatever I was doing with me - whether I was going out for coffee or 500 miles away. I have since bought a few new laptops. A Dell that kinda just didn't work out for me. From it, I thought I truly hated Vista - until I bought the next one, also a Dell and discovered the enormous difference a built in dedicated graphics card could make! I had another laptop given to me by a school - that one had an even smaller hard drive but it was a nice IBM/Lenovo one. Tried a couple of netbooks and while no specific complaints, they tend to sit on the shelf. Just a little too small and not enough USB ports. I very recently went over to the other side, at least for sometimes, and bought a Macbook Pro. Haven't used it enough yet to comment at all though. Now one very interesting thing I want to note here - I am currently typing this on that very same little old laptop I first mentioned. Yep, the circa 2003/2004 one! It remains a great little machine and I have certain non-transferrable software on it so I still do a fair amount on this computer! (By the way, it is an Inspiron 700m for anyone curious - frequently available on the biggie online auction site for $200 or less - I would recommend it over a netbook anyday and it is almost as small and light!) Okay thats all from me for now!