Bought a new Dell Inspiron laptop preloaded with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex for my wife and it arrived this week. 2 GB memory, 2GHz Pentium T4400, 15.6" glossy LCD screen -- got it complete and delivered for only $460 and change. Its really sweet and she loves it. It blows my Windows Laptop away which is remarkable considering I've got a much faster processer than she does. Windows sucks, but I get paid to use it so I can deal - lol
My son was impressed with her Intrepid Ibex and he wanted an upgrade, so we decided to load Jaunty Jackalope on his PC and test that out. The whole process of backing up his files and work, downloading and burning the Jaunty CD, rebooting into the install, repartioning his hard drive, and installing Jaunty took under an hour. Try doing that with Windows. It would have taken less time than that, but the installer appeared to get "stuck" at 82% "Scanning the Mirror...". and it took me a few minutes to realize it was going to take all night if we waited because the default Ubuntu mirrors are painfully slow on occasion, so I just went to the router and pulled his network cord out so it would time out and continue. The install was complete and ready to reboot before I could walk back to his computer. Rebooted his computer, put the cable back and added the Jaunty Restricted pacakges from universe so he could have Flash, Java, mp3, DVD and all those goodies and enabled the Restricted nVidia drivers and it was rocking.
I'm going to setup a local mirror on one of my machines or change to Georgia Techs mirror and install a Jaunty Jackalop over my other Hardy Heron and my Gutsy Gibbon this weekend. Once I have a faster mirror setup instead of the default us.archive.ubuntu mirror which is painful slow, I should be able to install and completely update both machines in 30 minutes or less.
And anyway, getting back on the subject of Dell and Ubuntu -- I highly highly recommend you give them a try next time you buy a computer. Their custom distro of Intrepid Ibex has Java, DVD MP3, Adobe Flash, Compiz and everything enabled right out of the box.