I don't know what you mean by "fast" or "powerful" but... I own and use an inspiron 640m. It's about 340 dollars with shipping on eBay right now. It's a core d

I don't know what you mean by "fast" or "powerful" but... I own and use an inspiron 640m. It's about 340 dollars with shipping on eBay right now. It's a core duo, runs 3D apps pretty well, runs pretty fast once you put 2 gigs of ram in it. Some of you might be thinking how slow it must be... but for text editing and compiling? Computers aren't getting much faster nowadays, just more cores. The primary slow down on most computers is the hard drive and RAM. In that regard, it runs more than adequately. I can do normal computing stuff: Code::Blocks/OpenOffice, play some low-end games, watch movies (it supports 720p). Boot time is very good on Ubuntu 9.04 - about 40 seconds. It's also very light at only 6 pounds. Battery life is good too, on full bright I can get about 5 hours still. At this price, you could get 5 or 6 of these instead of one high-end computer. Hard to go wrong with that. I would even recommend getting this if you like the idea of a net-book but don't like the small screen. I love this computer :)