One thing to keep in mind wrt notetaking in class is that this
only works well if your notes are straight text. i.e. diagram-heavy
classes (any science, math courses, data structure / algo classes,
etc.) or ones that require lots of non-ascii symbols (math and science
again, if you try to type out the names of greek symbols in, say, a pchem
class you're never going to keep up) won't work well if you're restricted
to a keyboard and mouse arraingment (or god forbid handwriting recognition
and stylus on a teensy screen).
emacs is probably not tenable on anything handheld or
palmtop. and vi(m/le/whatever) w/out a KB would suck. (ESC:wq on a
stylus?)
So basically if all you want is a cheap system to code in a
coffeshop or library or on the crapper, a laptop from used-pcs.com up in
cedar park is probably your best bet (or off of ebay or something). The
$299 Toshiba laptop (p75, 40mb ram, 1.2g HD, cd & floppy) would probably
fit the bill nicely (as long as you don't want to run X11/Gnome/E/Xemacs
;-)) for this use. Heck, the $159 486 laptop would probably work OK if
you didn't plan on using X11 at all (just console emacs, don't know how
well emacs would jive with 16meg of ram though).
Another possibility for a really small machine are the
"palmtop" pcs starting a few years back (look on ebay for things like HP
jornadas and such, I've seen them sub $100 for 486 models).
Mike
--
Michael Jackson | http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~orion
"I aim for the stars. Sometimes I hit London." ~ von Braun
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