I'm using a Bastard Dell Inspiron 1100, that I got for free from a friend.

I upgraded the memory, partitioned the hard drive, took out a USB slot (for more cooling on the one I kept), put in a small fan, and took out VISTA and installed windows XP and linux (which I'm still learning about) as a dual boot.

I use an At&T 3G card, and get reception everywhere here in suburban PA. And I burn things to CD rom. I have two batteries, and a 12 volt adapter.

So yeah, this I think is a useful device for a while. It crashes all the time, as it is so Frankenstein, but I can pretty much fix it without help as I know its quirks. I just hate viruses. I've spent many a night after getting infected picking through screens of process monitoring trying to find those damn DLLs.

I'd probably grab it, at least for the car in a BO situation. If I could drag up a printer, I'd have publishing capability for manuals, guides and a newspaper. Valuable trade goods.