J:
What I would do if I were to leave a laptop in a patient room is to purchase one of the many "off lease" laptops from ebay. I am partial to Dell, since they overall are tough as nails. I've purchased 9 C640's/C840's in the past 8 years and most are still working, although worn out by me through daily usage. The C840's for example, have a 15" screen and always come with Win XP Pro, and occasionally with MS Office 2000/2002 or 2003... and nowadays go for about $250 to $500 depending on the configuration (I like 2GB ram and 2 120GB HD for ghosting, so $500 is usually my cost after upgrading). URL:
http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38&_nkw=dell+c840&_sacat=See-All-Categories . These usually are heavy, clunky, and difficult to walk away with, but you can purchase a laptop lock for about $7 on eBay-
used Dell laptop listing .
I just purchased another Dell laptop, but this time a dual-core 17" 1720 for $700. It was used, but in excellent condition, and it came with all the bells and whistles...
Dell 1720 laptop . Now, that is the top-of-the-line Inspiron model, but if you wish to buy it I suggest going through the Dell warehouse that is having a sale- my laptop could now be purchased "refurbished" (i.e. not new, not used, but fixed or returned, so almost new) for about what I paid for mine, and possibly less:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/inspnnb?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfhTablet PCs? The Motion tablets are going for cheap if you don't mind a slightly slower model. Check this one out for less than $400 (including shipping)-
eBay motion tablet .
The reason that I would go with the dual core systems is for speech recognition... I hear that DNS flies with the dual core CPU (it does pretty well with a P4 3GHz, but I want even better performance!).
