My chance to boast about my new laptop.
I just bought a Dell Latitude X300 on eBay, it cost me 750 GBP.
It's refurbished with a two scratches on the bottom, and a US keyboard, it didn't come with any warrenty. I think the price of buying it new from Dell would be close to 1400 GBP with VAT.
Subsystem Status Hardware / Comment ----------------- ------ ------------------ USB Working IEEE 1394 Untested Ricoh R5C552 Modem Untested Keyboard Working Volume and brightness controls don't work Touchpad Working Synaptics Touchpad, Sensor: 37 Video Working Intel 855GM, 3D not working PCMCIA Working Ricoh RL5c476 II SD Card slot Not working Ricoh RL5c476 II Ethernet Working Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet Only Gigabit with the docking station Wireless Ethernet Not working Broadcom 802.11g/802.11b Bluetooth Working Battery status Working Internal USB connection AC status Working Optical Storage Working Hard disk Working Audio Working AC97 CPU Scaling Working
The laptop weighs 1.29kg, or 2.9 pounds, almost 1kg lighter than the Apple iBook G4 which I was thinking of buying.
Only 20mm thick. Battery lasts 2.5 hours, which is a shame. I can buy a larger battery for 68 UKP on eBay, but that will add somewhat to the size and weight. Screen is 12.1", no dead pixels. Two USB 2 ports, the DVD/CD-RW drive is external and plugs into one of them, one firewire port, IrDA, full size VGA port, no serial, parallel or PS/2. The machine is very quiet, I can't hear anything from it.
Processor is a Pentium-M 1.2 GHz, 256MB of RAM, Hard disk is 30GB.
I'm using a Jiffy bag which cost me 80p for padding when I carry it. Just keeping it in my regular rucksack.
It's a shame the WiFi and SD aren't working, there's a project on SourceForge to write a WiFi driver, but haven't found anybody working on the SD. For now I've got a wifi card in the PCMCIA card slot.
So far a great laptop and I'd recommend it to anybody.