Apparently I managed to be allocated a work laptop in record time (i.e. the day I started). I scored a Dell Latitude D600. It came with the preinstalled company SOE of Windows XP (and it's a shite SOE at that). That night, I shrank the NTFS partition and installed Sarge in the spare space I'd created. I have to say that I think that QTParted is extremely cool. I have some rescue CD, the name which currently eludes me, which has QTParted on it, and I just booted off that, and shrank the NTFS partition, as easy as falling off a log.
Linux seems to work particularly well on this laptop. The video works without any special treatment, the onboard Ethernet is a Tigon3, which seemed to work fine without the firmware, the onboard wireless is an Intel 2200BG, which worked find once I downloaded and built the driver. I think it even has IR, but I haven't tried getting that working yet, and it has a serial port. The keyboard doesn't suck too much either. Apart from the screen size (which isn't that bad, it's 14.1", but does 1280x1024, but apparently according to the webpage, can be coerced into doing 1400x1050, which I must try), it's not a bad little laptop. The battery life is fairly reasonable as well. I've just hit 2 hours with the wireless on, and I've arguably got another 40 minutes remaining.
I only discovered that to get suspend to disk working, I needed to make my swap partition 30% larger than my available RAM, after I'd already installed with a swap partition equal to my RAM amount, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, as I'm reluctant to reinstall again.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I might consider buying one personally.