Why doesn't anyone ever mention andLinux as an option? I have it installed on my over-a-year-old vista laptop with 2 gigs of ram and it runs great (I have a bash terminal window, photoshop cs3, dreamweaver, intype, and firefox open right now). I program with Rails nearly every day on this machine, using the terminal for all of my scripting needs and have never run into a problem. All I really need from Linux is the command line anyways...