Don't buy the 2900XT. It looks like you've been talking to the same couple of people who clearly don't have a clue. It's a piece of garbage. Truely a horribly inefficient and poorly designed card. I suggest you go read an honest review, like the one over at HardOCP. It comes out underperforming in every single game compared to the 640mb GTS, and consumes 100W more power. It's also hot (runs at about 90C) and loud and it costs more. It was delayed for six months because ATI/AMD knew it had a turd on its hands.

Yeah, maybe they can fix some of the performance problems with better drivers. But I really would advise you to stay away from it. ATI/AMD is probably going to be very quick with a refresh of the card that uses a smaller process.

And I'm not an Nvidia fanboy or anything. My last two cards were ATI. I'm just trying to keep you from making an expensive mistake. This is basically just like when Nvidia released its disastrous FX5800 a few years back...

It's an exceptionally powerful card that unfortunately doesn't support DirectX 10. It will last, but I think you'll eventually be somewhat disappointed with it once DirectX 10 is in full swing later this year. And as others have stated, I would stay away from gaming laptops in the future, although you may not have had a choice depending on your circumstances. They're heavy, have poor battery life, run hot, are expensive, and aside from the ram and HDD, you can't upgrade them like a desktop.

You should be able to build a 17" dell inspiron with a 7900GS for roughly the same price or less. And the 7900GS mops the floor with the 7600.

Buy a motherboard that uses an intel chipset (either 965 or 975), unless you want your computer to be a giant paperweight. Seriously, nothing beats the stability of an intel chipset. Also, use quality ram, like Corsair XMS, otherwise you're just asking for trouble. Zipzoomfly and Newegg both have Corsair XMS 2GB DDR2 800 for around $100. Don't bother with an 8600. They're crappy cards. Get at least a 320mb Geforce 8800GTS. And hold off on Vista if you know what's good for you. It's pretty awful for gaming at this point.

OEM means you can't transfer the operating system from one computer to another. If you decide to upgrade later, that copy of windows is worthless on your new system. Sometimes this policy isnt  strictly enforced by MS, but you never know. That's the advantage of buying retail.

I'm sure we're going to see a lot of backlash at the news media for devoting so much time to the psychopathic killer and his insane ramblings ( basically doing exactly what he wanted), instead of focusing on the victims. While I honestly would never expect them to pass on such a huge story, they could certainly handle the matter of his "manifesto" a lot more tastefully. 

That was precisely my reaction when I got mine. And I was coming from a pretty decent video card already, an X800Pro.

It serves you guys right for hyping the 8600 cards endlessly without really knowing anything about them. What were you really expecting from 128-bit cards anyway? It looks like they aren't signifcantly better than the X1950Pro and 7900GS they are designed to replace, other than that they support DX10, and are actually worse in games that stress memory bandwidth. I'll reserve judgement on the R600 for when it's out, but something being this heavily delayed is usually a bad sign.

On another note, I'm glad I bought my 8800GTS back in early February. It's looking more and more like my impatience paid off.