In the end I chose the HP compaq nc4010; I had serious doubts about the build quality of the Dell, the Apple lacked working WiFi and no PCMCIA to get around that either and the IBM lacked a touchpad and Matt's problems haven't been encouraging.

In general I've been extremely happy with it, every part of the hardware I've tried to get working so far has been pretty easy to get working. Bdale and Martin'a experiences with the nc4000 have been pretty helpful too.

The one thing I've not been able to get working though is ACPI S3 suspend, or suspend-to-RAM if you prefer. The laptop goes to sleep just fine but doesn't wake up at all. Experiences of others on #debian-uk seem to concur this isn't specific of my laptop either, everyone's been playing with ACPI suspend over the last few days and I don't think anybody's got it working right yet.

It's an obviously huge whole in the hardware support in Linux, a pity really because otherwise ACPI functions perfectly giving detailed information about the system and batteries.

If anyone's got any idea where to start debugging why the laptop doesn't wake up, that'd be great; I'm going to see whether a serial console can produce any information during wake-up that I'm not seeing because neither the screen nor keyboard come back.