How do you use your Dell?

My Dell doubles as a backup primary machine. It has better battery power, bigger screen and a faster processor than my primary machine, an HP tz2500.

 

Use it for school work (Computer Engineering undergrad) and hopefully this will last me until I finish my 4-year course in 2012.

 

Thanks everyone for the great replies!

Lots of cool stuff going on.

 

Vostro 1510

I use mine for practically everything, from web browsing to the occaisonal photo editing and even some games.

I've been using Ubuntu 9.04rc exclusively for the last week and can't report any problems using it on my Vostro... XP and Vista on this machine just kept pizzing me off...

 

Sorry, but I fear that my usage is far from unique or high-end

Background: I am a medical student. I bought my E5400 to use for taking notes and tests with during school. I hope it will last me until the end of next year as that's when I am done with any formal classroom eduction. It replaced a Gateway C-120X tablet that died a premature death from a broken screen hinge that cut through the LCD power cable and shorted out the motherboard.

Most used programs (low-end to high-end):
Novell Evolution e-mail client
Mozilla Firefox
Rhythmbox to play back online radio
OpenOffice.org: all the boring stuff that comes with college. taking notes, taking tests, presentations, diagrams, etc.
MPlayer to play back the histology and procedure DVDs

I use my desktop for everything else as has at least an order of magnitude more GPU power and HDD space, plus two very nice LCDs (23" 2048x1152 Dell SP2309W + 20.1" 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP.) I use my laptop as, well, a laptop. It probably gets used 95% of the time running on battery.