The desk portion of my nav table really only holds the ships papers, engine manual, flares, a spare flashlight and the hand held VHF which hasn't been used in 8 or 9 yrs. (I never use the vhf, why would I use a handheld???)

I could bring the nav station desktop home to the shop and do it up right, too. My nav table surface is formica, of all things. (on top of what appears to be mahogany veneered ply. At least the banding is mahogany. Maybe while I'm at it, I should get a mahogany veneer sheet in case the formica is on plain ply. :D

The only drawback I see, is having just ordered a new laptop, what about changing sizes? I'm going from a 17" HP to a 15.6" Gateway, but would really prefer to go back to a 17" Unfortunately right now, the only company making 17" laptops is HP and I will never own another HP.

POS HP vid card died 2 mos after warranty ended and HP said, tough. $800 to fix it. Vid card is built into mother board. I paid $2,000 for 14 months use on that POS. Turns out, the video cards are prone to die after 14 months. There's people complaining about them all over the net on various forums. The story is always the same. Tough shit.

For work, I switched to a Gateway quad core Desktop with 23" monitor for $700 and have never been happier. We're just now getting to the point where I can afford the luxury of a laptop that is not my primary computer.