OT: In need of a notebook

[Baron Munchausen]

AgentZero said:
I too am interested in this subject, since I'm looking to get a laptop for notetaking. Writing out 20 pages of notes in 2hrs by hand is just painful.

I'm looking for something with reasonable specs, because I don't want to spend 10 minutes waiting for the OS & Word to load. I'm not too bothered about the OS, XP is fine, Vista is fine... although I would like to get something maybe running Linux, since that should help with the nice & speedy aspect of it.

Just going for "Linux" doesn't guarantee 'speedy' anymore. The most popular desktop environments, KDE and Gnome, are every bit as machine-clogging as Windows these days. But that's because they are loaded with fancy features, like Windows. A distro that offers XFCE as an option would be a good start for 'speedy' on older hardware. (Fedora has this as an option, for example.) You could also go with some of the specialized distros designed to be as small and fast as possible, like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux.