Thanks All!
I can happily say that I built my first one from scratch and will NEVER
same here I have never purchased a DT (whole) from anywhere! Unfortunately our hardware gutting days are over for a while. Life for the foreseeable future will not allow the time it requires. Therefore my first foray into buying something bundled (and my first laptop).

Was very happy with AMD's Athlon/Thunderbird SocketA last time we gutted. Speaking of price drops my husband just HAD to break the 1G barrier, when 1G’s first hit the market. In the past we had always gutted staying 2nd /3rd generation back for the price break.
He paid about 1K for that chip and you should have seen the price drop in the next 6 months!.

It is the CPU I’m running now and has been VERY stable, (until I let the web trash my computer). When it launched it was much more reliable than the Pentium peer equivalents on the market at that time.

Now your issue is, you want the best screen Yes and largest
Stay away from desktop chips stuffed into notebooks Thanks you just confirmed what I thought I noticed on a quick surf. Stay with the mobile architectured chips, for heat reduction among other issues. (Heat= enemy of electronics in my book, + My LAP!)
Also, how much of an issue is portability to you? not an issue. This LT will be used for its portability in my home office (very rarely to travel with). So I’m not factoring weight, and size (since I desire the largest display) is locked into largest.
Yes has to be Wireless (totally new territory for me!) I need it to talk to my DSL from other rooms.
Who has the fastest (stable) CPU currently in laptops which runs with least degradation while on battery?
(not specs ….real life crunch tested)
Which runs the coolest (now know stay with M chips to help this area)
Whats the most Ram a LT can hold?