Mine is very quiet.

Are you pretty much happy with it?

I will be using it to travel from my home to law school daily. It will be my secondary computer and must be portable.

Do you think the D500 will serve me well?

I've been happy with the D500. I haven't had the opportunity to test battery life yet, I've pretty much been running off the AC adapter. The Pentium M should be good in that department though. I didn't get a DVD-CDRW drive as part of the original purchase (Dec 03). I did pick up a module adapter and second 40GB, 5,200rpm hard drive off ebay and have been happy with that too (paid about $150 for both). I haven't been able to test the wifi card yet but have no reason to suspect that that will be a problem either. Display is bright and crisp, keyboard is slightly spongy.
Portability should be no problem.
Overall I'm very satisfied with the D500.

Message Edited by westyellmt on 02-04-2004 09:51 AM

I've noticed some heating under the left palm rest, above the HDD, while installing multiple programs one after the other. I installed six or eight substantial applications (MS Office, Photo Shop, MS Money, Norton System Works, Mozilla FireBird, Kerio Personal Firewall, etc, as well as numerous utilities (AdAware, SpyBot S&D,MS RegClean,WinZip,Proxomitron,etc) in one sitting and had some noticeable heating at that time. Obviously the HDD was pretty active during that period and the computer required multiple reboots. I have web surfed for about the same amount of time with no real noticeable heating at all. Ambient temp during these periods was between 65 and 75F.

Well thanks for all the help. The D500 seems like what i'm looking for. The price is right too--I'm glad I checked out the Latitude line.