Good Cheap (€888 including 20% vat and delivery) Arrived within a week of the order Fully supported by linux (except modem) Battery lasts for about 3 hours and charges quickly Good contrast ratio on the LCD Bad battery only rated for 500 recharge cycles video RAM uses main mem conexant modem (not supported by open source software) Doesn't seem to have an IrDA interface?

I needed to buy a new laptop on 17 Feb 2006 after being hit by a car while cycling with my laptop on my back.
I was fine but the laptop, bicycle and car windscreen were shattered. Anyway...

Here's a summary of the components:

• 1.7GHz pentium M with 2MB cache (Family: 6, Model: 13, Stepping: 8)
• 512MiB 400MHz dual channel DDR2 SDRAM
• Hitachi 60GB Hard disk (Model: HTS54106, Rev: MB30)
• NEC DVD+-RW (Model ND-6650A, Rev: 102C)
• 1280x800 15.4" LCD
• Mobile Intel 915GM graphics
• broadcom 100Mb NIC (Model BCM4401-B0, Rev: 02)
• Intel PRO/Wireless (Model 2200BG, Rev: 05)

It's a nice performance improvement over my previous laptop:

$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
    Timing cached reads:        2308 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1152.45 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads:  104 MB in  3.02 seconds =   34.41 MB/sec

$ ./nbench

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          855.09  :      21.93  :       7.20
STRING SORT         :          73.861  :      33.00  :       5.11
BITFIELD            :      2.6375e+08  :      45.24  :       9.45
FP EMULATION        :          105.36  :      50.56  :      11.67
FOURIER             :           16892  :      19.21  :      10.79
ASSIGNMENT          :           19.65  :      74.77  :      19.39
IDEA                :            3160  :      48.33  :      14.35
HUFFMAN             :          1226.8  :      34.02  :      10.86
NEURAL NET          :            16.4  :      26.35  :      11.08
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          771.72  :      39.98  :      28.87
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 41.258
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 27.249
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : GenuineIntel Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.70GHz 1696MHz
L2 Cache            : 2048 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
C compiler          : gcc version 4.0.0 20050519 (Red Hat 4.0.0-8)
libc                : libc-2.3.5.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 9.783
INTEGER INDEX       : 10.698
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 15.113
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

It also has USB 2.0 support which means nice fast transfer to my external HD USB cradle

$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   64 MB in  3.03 seconds =  21.10 MB/sec

Update Oct 15th 2007 - Replacement power supply

The external power supply died today after about 19 months use. Pretty heavy usage to be honest, averaging 11 hours a day, 5 days a week, or around 4500 hours in total. This time was confirmed with the command smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours, which is a useful "odometer" for a system assuming the harddisk has not been replaced. I had a quick look on Dell's site where a replacement power supply would have cost me €57, so I just spent a couple of minutes on ebay.ie and ordered a new one for €18 which arrived the next morning. Dell really nail you on the accessories.