Aye, these are the same Toshibas. Just need to find a power supply for it and it'll be good to go. He'll probably keep them up there for a week or so before they go to the crusher, so i'll try and snap up them all if I can (probably give one to a friend, to the brother, etc).I'd go with the Toshiba. I remember back in primary school, all our teachers had Toshiba Satellites, the old gray ones. They were awesome.
As for the ethernet jack, a lot of low end PCs are like that. A while back I refurbed a Toshiba Satellite Celery-M 1.5 (i think it was, anyway) for a customer and it had the same thing. I removed the cap and plugged it into my network, just to see what would happen, and nothing happened. A look at the guts of it later on revealed that there was no ethernet circuitry on the machine whatsoever.
Shame about the ethernet jack for sure, that would have been the icing on an already very sweet cake. Looks like I may need to get a PCMCIA one, then it should be just fine.
Battery is calibrating now, seems to be charging to 40% (10% more than when the machine shuts down unexpectedly) and still going. Chances are it'll make it a decent way according to the calibration info, maybe around 70% or so. More if i'm lucky.
EDIT: Good news. Battery calibration is currently draining the battery down in stage 2 reconditioning. Even with all power saver features disabled it's going on 2 hours battery charge. Bloody beautiful.