Before my 7th term at university, I bought a bunch of 486 laptops and cannibalized what I could; I decided my typing was better than my handwriting so it seemed a smart way to take notes.
I ended up alternating between a Dual DC-4000 with 12M memory (notable for taking desktop-style 72-pin SIMMs and having a socketed CPU) running OS/2 3.0 with a 5x86-133 upgrade in it (it was likely originally a DX-33 or DX2-66. When I bought it, someone had stuck a 3.3v DX4-100 CPU in, which had minor heat issues considering the machine probably ran at 5v default), and a Toshiba T1950CT (486DX2/40) with 20M (nice screen, snap-on-trackball) running FreeDOS and GEM (too slow for the OS/2 pack-in wordprocessor to keep up).
Finally, for my last term, I spent $300 of scholarship money for an IBM 385XD (PII-266, 32M memory I upgraded to 96) which ran Slackware and eventually obtained an 802.11b card for that wireless network which had just rolled out.
The Thinkpad just died last year (a fault code listed as fan-related, and replacing any part on a machine that old, heavy, and thick seemed a poor proposition) so I went with a netbook.