Most bang for the buck you'll find

I purchased this recently (writing this review on it) to replace my previous low end HP laptop.

I didn't want the overhead of Vista, but I was in a bind and needed do some field work and had a very limited budget.

This was the only model in the local shop that was in my price range, so I bought it anyway with the intention of switching to XP fairly quickly.

Lenovo is rare in that they don't attempt to shoehorn users into whatever OS is being hyped at the moment.

In addition to fully supporting either XP or Vista, the laptop is certified for a couple of linux distros, and works with others to varying degrees.

This is a welcome change from Sony, who I have regretfully stricken from my Preferred Hardware list since I had to rma a high end Vaio notebook on which Sony had locked out video drivers from the manufacturer.

What's also nice about this line is that I was able to purchase it inexpensively, and later replace the cpu with a faster one.

The mini-pci slot is easily accessible, and again, is not locked via the bios to recognize only approved hardware.

Memory is upgradeable to 4gig.

The notebook does ship with it's fair share of bloat, but it also ships with really nice Lenovo recovery tools.
It was no big deal to to 'refresh' the system opting not to include 3rd party apps that I don't want/need.

After having done so, performance in Vista is enough even with the entry level Celeron and a gig of ram to satisfy my basic functionality needs.

I'm not a gamer, and most of my work is via Remote Desktop anyway, so I don't *need* gobs of power, but it's nice to know that I can upgrade to get it.

Lenovo also makes high end notebooks, so don't let their low end offerings scare you away.