I have the Dell D830 and it has a nice big beautiful display. But more importantly it has a real serial port and a PCMCIA slot.
I also have a few of the Dell D630 and really like that too. Little smaller size and lighter than the hefty D830. Also has a real serial port and PCMCIA.
I have been evaluating a Toshiba Tecra M9 for the last few weeks and it is also a nice notebook. Compares real well with the Dell D630. Has all the same ports as the D630.
One gripe I have with the Toshiba though is that it appears to have been developed with Vista in mind. While it can also run XP, it is a pain to install as the installation does not natively recognize the SATA drive. The XP drivers I got from Toshiba would not allow me to install XP (or W2K3). I had to go to Intel's web site to get the files I needed to begin the installation. So XP seemed very much an afterthought.
Ok, one more gripe with the Toshiba. I hate the BIOS. First thing I do with a PC is get into the BIOS and set it up the way I want. The BIOS on this looks like something out of the late 80's. BAD!! I could not get the boot order the way I wanted: CD, Floppy, HD. It always inserted LAN as an option ( CD, LAN, Floppy, HD) so it would ALWAYS look for the PXE boot. The Dell BIOS beats this hands down.
I am about to send this unit back with a recommendation that we stick with the Dell D630. But, if you are running Vista, maybe with VMWare, the Toshiba might be a good option as it does have all the right ports.
OG