9200 question

Little backstory first to kind of introduce my situation...skip the first paragraph to get to the real content of the post.

Ok here's the deal. I found this website while searching for opinions on the 9200. My company does quite a bit of business with Dell and thus we of course have an Employee Purchase Program. The program is active now so I could order at any time but I'm waiting on a seperate program to become active within our company for Managers and IT (I work in IT). Basically for the second program my company would give me a 0% interest loan on a single system I want to buy, desktop or laptop. Payments would be automatically deducted from my check. The extra bonus in this program is that in exchange for certain configuration requirements (yet to be disclosed by my boss) the company will kick in $750 towards the purchase of the system. Needless to say I'm waiting on ordering my laptop. In addition to all that my boss thinks he can work our Dell contacts (since they have screwed up a couple times in the past) to get the even more off on our systems. All this has about 4 of us in our networking group patiently waiting for the deal to finalize. A couple of us are getting a bit impatient with our boss as it seems he's been kind of dragging his heels on it.

All this has me constantly checking for new deals on Inspirons...trying different configurations...etc.

Right now I've pretty much decided on getting the 9200 but after measuring out how much space it actually takes up I'm a little hesitant to go with it. I know it's dimmensions in comparison with my old NEC 6250 laptop (Which has a bad LCD Backlight) and it's considerably larger (though pretty much the thickness of the NEC laptop without the LCD screen). I'm just wondering how cumbersome are the 17" laptops? Do they make a huge difference in such situations such as traveling on an airplane? I'm already a fairly big guy so I think it'll fit nicely on my lap, but in situations like planes I'm wondering if I'm even going to be able to use it due to my gut and the limited amount of room in planes (and to a lesser extent, cars). If it would make things too tight I'd be more inclined to go with something like the XPS or 8600 (though I would sorely miss that nice 17" screen). I don't do a great deal of traveling but if I get a reliable laptop I'd like to be able to use it on any trips I do make. Any thoughts?

 

Well, weight wasn't really a concern I had since I'm fully prepared to lug around an XPS system if that's what I'm going to be getting. My concern is the dimmensions of the 9200...the physical space it takes up.

I'm thinking about going down to compusa or fry's and checking out any 17" laptops they have there.

 

I've had just that concern - anyway I've been talking to someone who has a 17" HP lappy and despite being pretty heavy he finds that he can travel with it just fine, use it in the car well etc. Anyway - he convinced me that getting a 17 incher would be fine.

Have
Dell Inspiron 2500, 800 Mhz P3, 312 MB Ram, 6.5 MB Onboard Graphics

Want
Dell 9200, 2.0 GHz, 1024 MB Ram, 128 MB Ati Mobility Radeon 9700 Graphics

 

Got a chance to go check out a 17" notebook at Best Buy today during my lunch hour. They had a 17" Sony next to a 15.4" Widescreen Sony and the 15.4" looks quite nice and the 17" just looks way too big for a laptop. I think I'm gonna get myself an XPS instead.

Have: NEC Versa 6230 w/Broken LCD Backlight (LCD still works just can't see anything easily)

Interested in: Inspiron XPS