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?