[vox] Looking at Laptops

[Ted Deppner]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 09:23:02PM -0800, Richard Crawford wrote:
> I'm now pondering a new laptop, and need some advice.  The basic
> requirement, of course, is that it needs to be dual-bootable -- I'm facing

Any current laptop will do this easily.

> Does anyone have any suggestions?  Any good stories?  Horror stories? 

Go Dell.  The floppy drive plugs into the parallel port, at run time, and
there's no need for any linux hardware drivers... it just plain works.
The little bit older dells, 1gig and under, are fully supported (APM,
sound, insert/remove cdrom, suspends) and with new batteries, I had one
that would run 11.5 hours or so on two batteries.

The newer laptops are still good, but the onboard modems are barely
supported, and suspending under X can blow away your X session, etc... you
can get by, but it's not a walk in the park just yet.  Run times for a 2.0
gig box with dual batteries is about 6.5 hours.  APM is a little flaky
too.

> Brands/models I ought to avoid, or that I ought to give serious
> consideration too?  Price is a consideration, of course -- if I can spend
> less than $2500, I'll be happy.

Dell has my nod at this point.  Their hardware just plain works, and it's
very well supported (excepting the bleeding edge stuff).  Their warrantee
stuff is very nice too... I've had two laptops, actively used and carted
around.  I've lost two hard drives (one after about a year and a half, and
one on the second laptop about 1 month after I got it).... these were no
biggy since I use rsync regularly and also partimage for the Windows
partition.  After nearly two years I wore out my left control key and a
cpu fan.  I do take good care of my equipment.

-- 
Ted Deppner
http://www.psyber.com/~ted/