Dell 700M vs Fujitsu S6220

I assume you want a thin and light with an integrated cd-rom drive? the thinnest of those varieties are the 600m/d600 and the d505, which are all about 1.25" thick. Otherwise, you could get the d400, x300, or 300m (if available where you are), which are even thinner, but need docking bays or external module bays to have a cdrom drive.

my honest opinion is this; i've got my 600m and i love it, but i really did want an even smaller notebook. now i realize it's really not a big deal having the integrated drive, especially when the external modular bay wouldn't even be a hassle anyway. it's great to have a portable dvd player and cd/dvd burner in one piece, but if you're truly looking for a tiny little notebook that still has some power, and you have the money to spend on it, get the d400. it gets the edge in my book for supporting the 745 dothan processor and a full 2 gigs of ram, while still being 1" thick. the x300 is .8" thick, but it can only hold a low voltage dothan and about half as much ram. sorry for rambling.... i hope that made some sense.

Yes, a Very Much Overlooked Contender in the Ultraportable Category

I have the D400 which I purchased about 6 months ago and it has been a wonderful laptop for many purposes. The screen is absolutely fantastic, bright and very sharp. A resolution of 1024 X 768 is perfect on a 12" screen. The keyboard has a great feel. It is a little smaller than a full size keyboard but does not feel cramped at all. It runs very cool and quiet. The location of the dedicated volume, mute and power buttons just above the keyboard is excellent. The location and feel of the pointing stick and the left and right click buttons for it are perfect for laptop use. It has an excellent selection of useful ports and connection devices as well. There are 3 USB 2.0 ports (one which shares the powered D-bay connector function), firewire, VGA out, 9 pin serial port, a single PCMCIA slot, RJ-11 modem, RJ-45 gigabit network, infrared and a lock slot. Another great thing about Dell is that finding and downloading and installing the drivers for the various hardware featues is very easy and straightforward. The best thing is the form factor. It is very comfortable in my lap even using it for a long time. For an ultraportable I don't think you could do much better. I was very fortunate to have picked mine up through their outlet as a refurb with an extra battery, 1.4 Pentium M processor, a 40gb 5400 RPM drive, 512mb memory and te external DVD drive at a good price.

I took it with me to Hawaii on vacation and it handled e-mail, photoshop, music and movie playing and ripping and video transfer and editing very handily. It is the perrfect size and weight to take just about anyhwhere. However, I personally do wish it had an integrated optical drive. I am forever installing software, ripping music CDs, burning DVDs, backing up data etc. So for me an integrated optical drive would be very nice. I have looked at the Fujitsu S series for this purpose but they seem very expensive for the feature set. I am so pleased with the D400 I think I will stick with it for an ultraportable. I have an external firewire DVD/CDRW so I can at least burn CDs if needed. The only drawback is that it needs a seperate power supply. I also went ahead and ordered a Fujitsu E8010d so I will have a full size for daily use with all the bells and whistles.