Last September I purchased a Dell Lattitude D500 laptop from a Dell store in Kuwait.  Dell is only direct in the U.S., but in Kuwait and Iraq, most goods are sold face-to-face.  I paid KD345 or roughly $1550.00.  It has a 1.3 Ghz Pentium M and 256MB of RAM.  I’ve added a 512MB chip, so now it has 768MB of ram now.   30GB hard drive.  Centrino. 

I am very satisfied with this laptop for a development platform.  I run XP Pro, VS.NET 2002, 2003, IIS, SQL Server 2000, Web Matrix, VSS, WinAmp, etc.  I’ve turned off the paging file to minimize hard disk usage, and it’s turned out well.  I’ve never used up all available RAM even with all my .Net programs running – ok, once when I used a static event with my ASP.NET pages, so every page retained a reference from the event and prevented garbage collection altogether. 🙂

This laptop is not slow by any means, and I get at least 2 hours on the battery with full screen brightness and everything running.  4 hours if I’m not in VS.NET.  I highly recommend it.  It has even done well in this very dusty part of the world.  I periodically used canned air to blow it out.  It’s a must.  The laptop runs very cool with most of the heat coming from the hard disk and RAM bays.  The cooling fan rarely has to kick in, so I guess Intel got the cooling right with the Pentium M.

Some bloggers have lamented over developing on a laptop or tablet, but I intend to use this laptop with a docking station when I get back home.  It more than meets my performance needs. 

I highly recommend the Dell Lattitude D500 as a .Net development platform.