I have still got one of these great robust laptops from the good old days.
The screen provides a good quality bright image, which works well outdoors.
I have been running linux on this laptop as firstly its free and you can tailor the operating system to run quick and efficiently on a laptop like this one which only has a pentium 2 processor.
when I got the laptop it came with windows 98 second edition, this was and still is one of the best and easiest to use operating systems still running. The keyboard is very easy to use, keys respond well to even the lightest touch, this may be a bad thing to some people who are used to heavy handed typing, but I prefer the light touch!
battery life is still very good even after all these years of ownership.
it still lasts for over 1.5 hours from a full charge, even with the brightness of the screen turned up.
the other good thing about this laptop is that it comes with both cdrom and floppy drives, some old programs came on floppy disks and without a working floppy drive it can be difficult to access these.
usb 1.1 and pcmcia ports enable me to access upto data usb storage devices and access the interent via my pcmcia wireless card (I had to purchase this seperately) just remember you will need a 16 bit pcmcia wireless card as other won't work very well this laptop.
So to save yourself a lot of money, just go out and buy a good old pentium 2 laptop like this one, if you want it for word processing and accessing the internet it does the same things as the latest £400 laptop but only for a fraction of the price!