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thanks to all who (directly/indirectly) responded to my previous introductory message! quite a friendly and helpful welcome! it seems that people have the spectrum of thinkpads covered. i'm just curious, particularly for those who use linux (and netbsd), how important the performance of the machine is (i.e. dx2-50 vs dx4-75 or dx4-100) as well as the size of the screen. sitting here with a 21" high-res monitor on my workstation (and a similar one on my macintosh) i've become accustomed to both size and resolution. but a previous 17" display with similar resolution on a different workstation posed no problem for me at all. for those who've compared in detail the 8.4" vs the 10.4", is there a distinct difference in the legibility and comfortable duration of use of these two? other than the new thinkpad 755 models with the improved performance/bit-depth screens, it doesn't seem to me that the size will be as big a problem as the limited 640x480 resolution that they have in all cases. perhaps a more limiting concern is the power of the processor. not being familiar with the intel products from experience, i don't know whether or not to expect the dx2-50 to behave significantly differently from the dx4-100---i.e., to have half the performance as the marketeers would like me to believe. i'm much more inclined to believe that there will be closer to a 1.3x speedup based on the base processor speeds (33mhz vs. 25mhz) since neither one has an incredibly high performance cache---neither 8kb nor 16kb seems like it would be all that much different in the unix environment. i have a hard time justifying to myself (and my wife who isn't all that excited about a portable unix machine in the first place!) the price differential between the 360C and the 755CE or 755CD (actually, the 755CD appears to be a better deal than the 755CE for the increment in features) seems like a lot for what doesn't appear to return a lot in performance or ability. so the upshot of this is, how important (and to what degrees) is the processor and the display worth the upgrade or is the 360C really at about the right price/performance point for someone who can't always justify his urges for power at any price? thanks! hopefully one day i can return the favor! ---K