Just got mine a few days ago after having it been delayed for about two weeks. The thing is pretty and very light. Granted I'm coming from an XPS M1710.

My initial concern was the battery seemed to be a little flimsy. I got the 9 cell and it doesn't seem like its on their too tightly. Another thing that will take some getting used to is, there's no snap on the lid so when you open and close it, no latch is keeping it there.

Batterylife is excellent, I think. I took it on battery once and just read what Vista reported as my remaining battery life and it jumped around from 3 hrs to 10hrs. I have an integrated card so I think around 10 hrs is about right.

Numero uno concern was having Vista installed. I just don't like it. It just feels slow and not stable. Could be just me but it's got to go. There are practically NO drivers though for the 1420 for xp on dells site. I found most of the ones I need except for the audio driver which I will try to jack from the vostro 1500 xp set . I'm still a little nervous about doing the xp install because of some things that may still go wrong that I've heard about(memory card bsods, hidden partitions). I guess I'll just wipe it with dban though, and start completely fresh with the XP home cd from my m1710 and pray it has the sata drivers.

Any luck with the XP install on your 1420