Dell Latitude: Opinions

A coworker of mine is heading back to college and needs a new laptop, his current one being an antique. He has gotten an offer on a discounted Dell Latitude w/ 3 gig of RAM and some other specifications that he hasn't gotten around to sharing with me yet. My own experience with Dell was strictly with a desktop, several years ago, and godawful.

However, he needs a laptop strictly for classwork. No gaming, no streaming video, and he's running XP instead of Vista so it doesn't need to be a terribly high-performance system.

I would expect the Latitude, since it's a "business" PC, to be higher-quality than those Dell targets to individuals. Anyone have experience with the Latitude series and feedback about their quality?