Hello. I'm new here and I'm ready to drop some major coin on a new laptop. This is the config I chose and am looking for some feedback...

Display: 17" Wide Viewing Angles WUXGA LCD with Super Glossy Surface (1920 x 1200)
Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Processor Q9550 / 12MB L2 Cache, 2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB
Video & Graphics Card: Dual Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTX Graphics with 1GB DDR3 Video Memory in SLI
Operating System: Genuine MS Windows® VISTA Home Premium 32/64-Bit Edition
Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 X 2048MB
Primary Hard Disk Drive: 200GB 7200rpm SATA 300 Hard Drive
Optical Drive: 8X DVD±R/RW/4X +DL Super-Multi Drive & Software
Warranty: Sager 1 Year Limited Parts and Labor Warranty with Three-Day Shipping Both Ways Paid

The hard drive may be a little small considering how much you're investing in that thing. You could get a higher capacity 5400rpm drive and then install an aftermarket 320GB 3200 rpm drive, migrate your OS to it and use the OEM 5400rpm drive as additional storage. This is what I did. It will save some money also.

Not concerned with storage space... just speed. But a good thought. What about the OS? Should I go with XP instead? And what's faster... q9550 or q6700?

Three year warranty!

The 9550 will be faster than the 6700. It's 2.83GHz compared to 2.66GHz and the newer chip has several other advantages such as larger cache, faster bus speed, and newer chip meaning it will likely run cooler and more efficiently. In my opinion it's well worth the extra $50. I wouldn't recommend going all the way to the 9650 just to squeeze out a few percent more speed because it's too much money. Quads are getting cheaper I see since I bought my 9262. The faster dual core chips will still outperform the quads in todays games but not by a significant amount and in a few months games using quad cores will be more common. I may have to drop one of these in my own 9262 at some point.

I run XP and am happy with it. You still get better application performance in XP over Vista but the gap is closing as Vista matures. DX10 seems to be over rated and at high resolutions the frame rate hit seems to be prohibitive even with very high end cards. I still have some software that absolutely won't run in Vista and although I've used Vista extensively I don't plan to install it on my 9262 anytime soon.

OS choice is really personal so you have to make your own call. I can't see buying into Vista when Windows 7 is due out in just over a year.

I prefer XP as well. The laptop will have the 64bit version of vista installed, but I'm not sure if I want to deal with 64bit drivers and software. Will 64bit vista run 32bit games???

32 bit apps will run fine in a 64 bit environment but they typically won't use more than 2GB so 64bit XP isn't really needed unless you run 64 bit applications or run several large applications at the same time but with gaming you're unlikely to want to do that.

The only 32 bit game I've heard that has been modified by users to use more than 2GB is MSFS X.

I'm not sure about driver support in 64 bit XP.

Good deal. I chose vista home premium just for the sake of owning it I think. The fact is, I'm used to XP and from what I'm reading, Vista isn't improving framerates or visuals in the games I'm interested in playing, so I'd just as soon keep XP. The memory limitations of XP concern me a bit... but only in regard to speed as opposed to multiple applications use. I wonder why there aren't more 9800m gtx sli benchmarks by now??? Thanx for the feedback.