i have dell latitude D800 for over a year now. overall i consider it the best laptop i used so far. i love high resolution, real com port and other goodies. i've been abusing it a lot and it survived so far. once the spills dust and metal chips got into keyboard, i ordered replacement which came next day and took 5 min. to replace. some people are afraid of high res screens, thinking they will not be able to see small text for example. well if that is concern, try choosing different dpi setting (display properties, settings, advanced, general, DPI settings). this requires reboot but it sure beats low res screens. i used it on occasion when i felt tired but most of time 96dpi on 1920x is what i'm comfortable with.
things to beware:
- laptop itself costs more
- only one PCMCIA slot,
- it seam that only one of three USB ports is high speed (one on side)
- just lost last dot rubber foot, have to order spare and use better glue
- one PSU died (cable shorted after number of twists). fortunately they are only $47CAD (this is about 6-7 times cheaper than what i remember paying for my old Sony vaio).
- biggest laptop bag they had is not big enough for my needs.
things i like:
- excellent screen, very bright, ultra sharp
- fast cpu, lots of ram, big and fast hdd, dvd burner
- MDI/MDX gigabit ethernet plus wireless, bluetooth, firewire, three USBs
- very quiet, very long run time on batteries (i was surprised for such beast), doesn't get nearly as hot as my previous machines (some of them would really fry your lap).
- runs everything, only had one crash in over a year and this was my fault
- can take some abuse
- cheap spare power supplies
- comes with two pointing devices which both work well (on my old laptops this was next to unusable), but i really like the little usb mouse.