In a message dated 8/7/2004 11:55:58 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kennethd@direcway.com writes: have picked up a few models from various sources, but would appreciate thoughts from those of you who have had experience with any models, and or know of good experiences with some?? 1. Dell 8600 --hear mentioneded quite often..............any thoughts?? I don't know the Dell 8600 but I have a not quite 2 year old Dell Inspiron 8500 that I use for nav purposes and a Dell Inspiron 8200 that my daughter uses in grad school which is just over 2 years old. We have had so many problems and parts replacements on BOTH machines -- memory, motherboards, keyboards, hard drives etc. and they are so unreliable that we are about to replace them both. Dell service is horrible with hours and hours spent on each failure. We have had so much trouble that I now consider them to be totally unreliable for navigation purposes, hence their replacement. Based on prior experiences with other laptops for navigation, I still believe in laptops, just not Dell units. We have a pilothouse boat and I have found that the normal laptop screen works quite well as long as I put a black plexiglas screen around it for daytime use. For night use, I put dark grey plexi (2 layers) over the screen. With the plexi in both cases, the normal screens have been all that I needed. No connection to Dell at all. Just a terribly dissatisfied customer that has spent a lot for these two computers and expected to have a better result! Jim (Jim & Mim McCrea, mcc272@aol.com Nordic Tug 32-154 "North Star" Home Port Norwalk, CT)