I am a big fan of the Panasonic business series. They were originally called "Lets Note" in japan but rebranded with "toughbook" in the US as the business ultra

I am a big fan of the Panasonic business series. They were originally called "Lets Note" in japan but rebranded with "toughbook" in the US as the business ultralight series. I have a Y4 currently. It is somewhat rugged, but the most important part is that it has every attribute I want: 3.5 lbs, 14" screen at 1400x1050, built-in DVD/RW, 5-7 hour battery life. The keyboard is quite nice also. Basically, I had a Macbook Air with more features in 2006. http://rdist.root.org/2008/02/07/panasonic-cf-y4-laptop-disassembly/ http://rdist.root.org/2008/02/07/panasonic-cf-y4-laptop-disa... If you want to replace the hard drive, you have to disassemble the whole thing. RAM upgrades don't require that though. I'm quite familiar with the BIOS and it's one of the better ones. It works fine with Linux and FreeBSD. They stopped making the Y series with the Y7. The replacement (F8 and F9) annoys me a little because they went to widescreen. I hate widescreen. What you want as a programmer is as many vertical rows as possible, not horizontal. The F9 is 1440x900. You gain 40 horizontal pixels but lost 150 vertical! It also has that weird handle thing but you can ignore it. I'm still happy enough with my Y4 that I haven't replaced it. It's such a good combination of build quality and firmware quality that I'm afraid of anything else.