If I were you I'd go and try before you buy. See what you think of the keyboard layouts. I find the keyboards on HP laptops especially irritating but they seem to be a better deal than Dells at the moment. Dell seem to me to be expensive for what they are.

If you are sticking with Windows then you should either

1) Buy something with hardware that can be upgraded for future Windows fatware - you might think that 16GB of RAM is excessive. I bet in a few years it will become common.

2) Buy something that can just about manage at the moment and chuck it away after 18 months.

If you want to run Windows 7 and XP then you could do that in a virtual machine - virtual box for example.

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1992 W201 190E 1.8 171,000 km - Daily driver
1981 W123 300D ~ 100,000 miles / 160,000 km - project car stripped to the bone
1965 Land Rover Series 2a Station Wagon CIS recovery therapy!
1961 Volvo PV544 Bare metal rat rod-ish thing

I'm here to chat about cars and to help others - I'm not here "to always be right" like an internet warrior



Don't leave that there - I'll take it to bits!