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There's some very useful info about Mebromi here:
http://blog.webroot.com/2011/09/13/mebromi-the-first-bios-rootkit-in-the-wild/

It only affects Windows machines with Award BIOS's and seems to be pretty hard to get rid of. Maybe this level of infection will someday force Microsoft to consider implementing a permissions-based filesystem to reduce the possibility of this type of infection in the first place.

Cheapest/easiest solution: buy a new mobo.
You may also be able to flash a backup using a Linux live CD as Mebromi is a Windows infector. If the virus infects Linux, use an MS-DOS boot disk (assuming there's an MS-DOS fversion of your BIOS flash utility). Never used it, but there's some info here:
http://www.bay-wolf.com/bootcd-bios.htm

Best prevention: disable BIOS flashing in your setup (if YOU need to flash your bios, enable it, flash, and then disable again).

There are several pc laptops that have upgradable video. This is becoming more common on high end laptops.

See also:
http://www.bay-wolf.com/videoupgrade.htm

Disclaimer: it was a warranty replacement, so I don't know whether or not it's easy to get these from Dell, but here's documentation that it's a replaceable, upgradeable component. On that laptop chassis, which consists of the Inspiron 8500, 8600, the Precision M60, and some others... D810 I think, M10... There are a few optional video cards you can order with the machine. More on the procedure here.

The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option on anything but Disk Drives.

It's already here. Once all processes on a system are blocking (waiting for something else to happen), the kernel normally executes a HLT (halt) instruction that waits for the next interrupt. Intel processors have reduced power consumption when executing HLT for as long as I can remember. Intel Pentium M processors also have SpeedStep technology. When not overridden by software, SpeedStep cuts the multiplier and the voltage when available power is reduced.

Dell D600's are garbage. We have about 40 of them. We use them with the extra battery, which is a different shape then the primary battery.

From what I've surmised they seem to drain the secondary battery first since that once can be switched to the cd-drive at any time. The problem I have is that alot of the D600's we have won't switch to the primary battery when the secondary is dead, they shut down and have to be powered back up. This sucks! Dell has been less then helpful in remedying this situations.
They also only have one PCMCIA slot, and I've heard it tends towards failure because it is really jammed in close to the processor and fan (too much heat). If you buy one you also might notice that it doesn't seem to step processor speed properly in XP. Here's a link to a site that talks about the problem and has a patch you can download.

I have a dell inspiron 366 MHz PII with the dual battery packs. It weighs over 10 pounds, and it has 155 WHr of capacity total. The battery lasts eight hours.

I love to code at coffeeshops, and in fact, took a year's sabbatical where I did most of my coding in coffeeshops. In the four years of owning this computer (it shipped with win98), only once did I ever run down the batteries. Eight hours of coding and I was pretty beat - six hours of creative thought was all I was good for at a time. I hope you can survive to 12, but you might want to try it before buy a machine to that spec.

(p.s. I love that machine, but it was too heavy for anything but a backpack)