I agree with almost everything Bunnie says, except:

1) I use Strawberry Perl instead of Cygwin. I'm scared of Cygwin. The only Unix utility I have on my Windows XP box is wget.

http://strawberryperl.com

2) I can't get myself to jump to widescreen Thinkpad. I like reading everything as high up on the screen as I can. I'm worried about my neck!