Thanks for the input, everyone! That helps tremendously.

Shonky, those links are especially helpful. They're convincing me that the XPS would essentially be a truly lateral move, and that's actually OK with me. I like my desktop, it's just more than I need and it limits my mobility.

As for ethernet, yes I absolutely do need it, but it's a bullet I'm going to have to bite. Anker appears to have an inexpensive gigabit USB adapter. I'm not happy about not having it built in, but I won't have much of a choice when it comes to ultrabooks (plus I REALLY like that screen on the XPS).

Originally Posted By: Shonky
Why do you have 24GB of RAM in your desktop? That's quite a lot. I do have 16GB in my XPS 15z but that's because I run a couple of VMs typically (e.g. a cross compile environment) and I generally like keeping a lot of things open. 8GB tended to run out a bit after giving ~4GB or more to VMs.

Yeah, that was a dumb upgrade. I was into time-lapse photography for a minute there, and the amount of memory it was taking up was tremendous. I had 6GB at the time and I kind of went overboard smile I tend to do that. The case for my desktop is also an absurdly oversized Lian-Li case with 6 5.25" bays, 3 external 3.5" bays, and 6 internal 3.5" bays. I could put 15 hard drives in this thing - I think 5 was my max at one point. Now I have three drives and I'm not using anything in the bays. Basically I'm not using the desktop for anything that makes it a desktop.

Again, thanks for the input, folks. As soon as I scratch the cash together I'll probably pick one of these XPS systems up. Definitely one of the i5 versions (I don't think there's an i7 model available). Speaking of which, anyone want to buy a huge desktop computer with too much RAM for $899? laugh
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Matt