Of course I didn't get the basic model. I customised it a bit to get that extra little bit of grunt out of this machine. The main tweaks were a 2.4Ghz Core 2 DUO processor, 4GB of RAM, a high-res 1920x1200 screen and a 9V battery.
The 4GB RAM is a bit wasted with the 32-bit version of Windows Vista that comes with it - I can "only" use 3.5GB of it. But the intention is to upgrade to the 64-bit version of the OS in the nearby future, so that's OK. The battery life with the 9v battery is OK for a machine of this performance - I can get up to 4 hours of adequatly heavy processing and WIFI connectivity. Admittedly, the battery does look a bit ugly sticking out at the back, but hey, you can't have the cake and eat it I guess. All in all, seems a good machine. Performance is great - I have already installed the tools I need most, including Visual Studio 2008 and Adobe Photoshop CS3, and they run much niftier than on my single core AMD PC. Moreover, the laptop is actually usable. Since this is my first laptop, I was a bit wary at first of the keyboard and stuff, but the keyboard that comes with the Dell 1720 has a great layout, not to mention the availability of numeric pad. A pleasant surprise, that.
Lastly, here are some pix of the actual thingie:
