If you have to spend extra or trade off some of the bells and whistles to get the extended warranty, then please do it - it is worth every penny. If that web site won't sell it to you, then make sure that you can purchase the warranty through Dell. I see this happen to one of my clients almost every month. They spend $1000+ on a very nice computer, and 18 months later the motherboard dies, their cat urinates on it, or something equally catastrophic occurs, and they
have no warranty.
Also, please treat your computer well - put Linux on it. As an IT, I respect what Microsoft did with some of the new aspects of Vista, but with the developments made in the last year with the Linux distributions, there shouldn't be any reason why you can't find one that is 64-bit, user friendly, has a nice GUI, runs Windows applications well, and is just right for you. Your hard drive is plenty big enough to have a dual boot. I see that you are an engineer; I'm sure there is someone at your firm who knows about this and is dying to just give you the Live CD that is in his briefcase (you think I'm joking). If you would like my
on the treatment you could use to romance your computer, then please feel free to PM me.