A little different from the trend, but I just built an htpc in October. My next upgrade will be after windows 8 comes out and I think I'm buying a Toshiba laptop for web surfing, such as reading Techspot. This 2004 Toshiba laptop worked well as I upgraded it from windows xp home to windows xp professional, to use iis to write a website in asp.net. I bought window xp professional during the vista upgrade period, so I also got vista business with it, 2 for the price of one. I never had trouble upgrading to vista as all those vista capable computer users did, except that it required 2g of memory (came with 512m). I had to replace the hard drive not due to it crashing but I think Toshiba used the same firmware as Seagate did when they had their problem, as the hard drive would occasionally become unresponsive requiring a reboot (always on light). The new Toshiba drive still goes into the same mode as did my Seagate that had the firmware problem (very seldom), but now recovers without a reboot after 1 minute.