I made the Grand Mistake of ordering my Vostro 1700 with Vista. I had the option of getting it with XP. It still would have sucked with XP, but probably a little less. I can't blame Dell for my choice of OS, but I can blame them for the utterly worthless wifi driver, which usually causes a system crash when I try to do a shutdown. When I power back on, the crappy Wifi driver won't connect on the first try, so it is necessary to do two reboots to get it to connect. I've gotten into the habit of starting the shutdown process, unplugging the damn thing, then putting it in a closet for it to shut down one way or another, and also expecting to have to boot it up twice every time I want to use it. What a piece of junk! My Macbook Air can boot up, connect to the net, and shut down at least 10 times in the same time it takes this Vostro to connect once. Another issue is that the Cisco VPN driver locks up the entire system about 99 out of 100 attempts to use it, making it basically impossible for me to work from home with this junk. Guess I can't blame Dell for the Cisco VPN issue, but other CoreDuo systems don't have this issue, so I place half the blame on Dell.

Primary reason for not buying Dell again - the battery lasted about 2 years and then conked out. The cost of a new battery £116!! They must be having a laugh at the expense of their customers. I won't buy a battery from dell, I would prefer to run it off mains than give them another penny.
The laptop itself has become slow and has now got a number of faults such as the mouse pad stopping working intermittently and very slow performance (despite it being a high spec machine).