Just to back up majorbloodnock, Toshiba are good.

I borrowed a Dell from work and just didn't like the machine. Resolution was horrible, keyboard was terrible and well it only had 512MB so it was slow for SQL Server.

My wife works for Toshiba, so I bought a Tecra A9, 160GB, 2GB RAM - I did get a nice discount through her employee purchase 🙂

Vista is absolutely horrible so I uninstalled that straight away and installed XP. SQL Server 2005 developer runs like a dream. I've not toyed with the VM side of things yet, but it runs SQL with no problem.