I'm happy with my Z505, but it might be a little small for what he wants. Perhaps the 880K would be better. Both come with ethernet and should be available with a modem, but the Z505 is a single-spindle laptop with a physically smaller screen. I think the XE17 might be out of your budget.

Win2K runs fine enough in 128Mb, BTW. Unless he intends on manipulating a truly large database in Access, that is.

Wade.