Considerations:
The chief consideration here would be speed and memory, but from the sound of things, any amount of speed and memory in a new laptop is going to be so far beyond what you are used to it’s not somethingyou even need to focus on.
Do you have cable or DSL internet? If you’re still on dial-up, wi-fi won’t do you much good, unless there’s a wi-fi ISP with a hotspot near where you are going to use the laptop. If you simply want wi-fi to be able to surf while lounged on the sofa, then, barring the hotspot situation, you will need to buy a wireless router and connect it to your high-speed modem.
If you are looking for wi-fi to sneak onto your wi-fi enabled neighbor’s high-speed connection, lemme just say that waiting for someone else to turn on their router so you can scam off them gets old real fast.
If you just want wi-fi just because you think you might use it one day, most models have it, but check. If you think you might be using it a lot while flying, I recommend a model with an actual physical switch that turns off the antenna, for convenience.
Many of them burn CDs and DVDs, but since you’re going budget, be sure to check.
How do you use your digicam? If you plug it directly into your computer, then just about every model will have a USB jack to plug it into. If you work mainly with memory cards, you will need to make sure the laptop you buy reads the cards you use, or buy a plug-in card reader for your type of card.
I don’t know the specifics of Dell laptop models these days, but I can tell you that in the four years I’ve owned a Dell desktop, customer service and tech support have taken a nosedive and are now firmly in swirly-water-land. In their desktop lines, HP has a rep for buying up the remainder of lines from small defunct computer companies and releasing them under the HP aegis, offerering little or no tech support a few months down the line. Don’t know if their laptop division works the same way.
In their 2005 survey of laptop-using subscribers (with 45,000 responses), Consumer Reports says that HP and Dell had about the same percentage of people reporting serious problems (18%), narrowly beating out Gateway and Compaq (19%), but being edged out by Apple and Toshiba (17%), and Sony and IBM(now Lenovo), (16%). CR says this small range of differences is not significant.
I have a Toshiba Satellite, and it’s sa-hweet.