Dell Latitude 2100. Deal or no deal?

[DoubleCheese]

Just been speaking to a Dell rep about a replacement laptop. I need good battery life, a small and light machine and XP Pro. to work on our office server.

None of the regular netbooks come with XP Pro, so they rep said they have a Latitude 2100 which they can spec with XP Pro. Similar to most netbooks (Atom 1.6 CPU, 160 GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 10.1" screen...) but built to their Latitude ruggedness. In addition I'd get an upgrade to Vista Business and for £15 to MS the upgrade discs to Win 7 Prof too.

Sound like a good deal or not?

Failing that, what are the implications of getting a Sammy NC10 say and an OEM version of XP Pro from the that Rainforest site?

 

[andrewdodd13]

Sounds like a not bad deal you're getting. However one thing I would point out is that the 10.1" keyboards are kind of a nightmare if you're doing lots of coding/scripting as the more obscure keys such as parenthesis and lower right punctuation are quite hard to type.

Other than that, the standard Atom spec holds up well, even against things like Visual Studio.

Technically you weren't meant to be able to buy OEM editions without buying hardware at the same time, but I don't know what ever happened to those "rules".

 

[DoubleCheese]

I wouldn't be doing any scripting on it so the keyboard shouldn't be a problem.