It's a very nice little box. The keyboard works well, the screen is pretty nice, but not perfect, and it's amazingly light weight even with the DVD replaced by the 2nd battery. I'm sure I'm going to be very happy with it.

I haven't used it much yet, and haven't installed Linux on it yet, but it's worked well with WinXP with the extra 512 MB of RAM installed. (I can't really say how much slower it is with only 512 MB - I bought more before I even received the laptop.)

The wireless networking works fine. I haven't tried to burn a disk with it. Since I've got a 512 MB, 1 GB, and 4 GB memory stick, I don't think I would be burning many disks with it anyway. It's a "nice to have" thingy in case other drives die.

It's very small and very light-weight. It weighs 2-3 pounds less than my T41 and it's noticable in a briefcase.

There are a few minor things I don't like about it:

1) The lower left and right corners of the screen are noticably dimmer than the rest. It's not much of a bother, but I'd be pissed if I spent over $2k on it.

[edit:] There is one pixel that is stuck on (green) about 3 mm from the left edge. Otherwise, the screen is fine. [/edit]

2) I had one key come partially un-snapped. It snapped back in place easily, and hasn't come undone again, but I wonder a little about the durability of it.

[edit:] It happened again this morning (the A key). One of the Stooges on Jabber ;-) pointed out that replacement keyboards are available on eBay for ~$20. I might grab one, but so far it's not a major problem.[/edit]

3) The drive bay battery was completely dead after having the system turned off for a couple of weeks. It's charging up fine (the main battery charges first, then the bay battery), but why did it happen?

[edit:] It charges and discharges the batteries sequentially. The main battery is charged first, the secondary battery is discharged first. I need to make sure it does a full shutdown as it defaults to suspending when the lid is closed.[/edit]

4) The touchpad driver doesn't seem to have the finger-scrolling that I'm used to with my T41. I don't know if there's some other way to get it working.

[edit:] The laptop has a fingerprint reader. Rubbing a finger across it enables either the scroll-wheel action I was looking for, or it pops up an icon on the screen (like on some Logitech mice) that lets the touchpad smoothly scroll the screen up or down. In looking around some more, I see that it is possible to enable scrolling on the touchpad itself. It uses a [link|http://www.synaptics.com/support/index.cfm|Synaptics] touchpad. [/edit]

5) There are some drawing artifacts in the "tray" at times with [link|http://www.rcis.co.za/dale/tclockex/|TClockEx] - a fancy taskbar clock. I have to stretch and shrink the number of rows in the taskbar to make it redraw correctly. I've never seen that with Win2k. I don't know if its related to XP or the screen geometry or TClockEx.

[edit:] This seems to be a problem with TClockEx, but one that I can live with.[/edit]

6) The Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End keys require that a Function key be pressed. It makes web browsing with the keyboard a bit of a pain.

Otherwise, I'm very happy with this little box. It's nearly perfect for a minimal highly portable PC. Of course, it's not very fast. I just installed BOINC on it and should have some benchmarks in a few days. I might get MEPIS installed in a few days too. If so, I'll report back with more info.

[edit:] With BOINC running full time, the screen at 50%, and the wireless on, the battery meter says the life is over 6 hours with both batteries fully charged. I haven't done a full battery run-down test yet.

Cheers,
Scott.