I have finally received my new laptop. In the end I got a Dell Inspiron 700m. Not my first choice, but it was about the only option to get the features I wanted at the price I wanted. It isn’t as bad as I feared, although it does have a cheap plastic feel to the case and the screen is horribly shiny. Other than that it is fairly nice and quite a lot smaller than my old Toshiba. Ubuntu installed relatively cleanly, but the stock kernel has issues with the Broadcom 4400B2 ethernet card (a kernel bug which is at least partly fixed in 2.6.9). That, and Dell’s seem to have a buggy video BIOS that means the X server has to be seriously beaten to give 1280×800 with the i810 driver. All the other hardware that I have tested seems to work, I think it is the first time I have had wireless and 3D working out of the box.
Why, when one of the single most common peripherals to connect to your laptop is a mouse, are the USB ports on the left side of the machine? (ibooks do this too.)