Help me buy a laptop!

[ciphergoth]

My work now say I should just choose a laptop, they'll check out and approve the purchase, then I should buy it! I don't suppose they'll want to spend a lot of money though - I don't think I can really justify spending over GBP 1000 or so.

So, advice, what should I buy? What features should I be looking for?

Important things:

• It'll mostly be a Linux machine. So the built-in Winmodem might be cute, but unless it's a Linmodem it's not much good to me. Ditto XFree86 support for the frame buffer, preferably with an open source (not binary-only) driver.
  
• I have to fly with it a lot. So the sort of laptop that puts the CD-ROM drive and floppy drive as separate accessories sounds tempting; I can just put those in hold luggage, making my hand luggage lighter. Hand luggage is usually limited to 5 kilos; it's annoying when the laptop takes three of those!
  
• Currently my laptop is my main Widnows machine as well as my work Linux machine. I do use Widnows from time to time. However I'm really not that pushed about bundled software, and cute features that only work under Windows are of very marginal interest to me.
  
• I think I'm more pushed about weight, ruggedness and reliability than performance. Battery life is somewhere inbetween.
  

I look forward to hearing ideas...

Comments

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

My work buys Dells with 1GB RAM for about £1500. Some points:

• They are quite large. Keyoboards seem good.
• The screen is 16 inches or so and 1600x1200 pixels. You, with your elvish eyesight, might like that. I find the pixels too small.
• They tend to have either ATi or nVidia chipsets. I use a nVidia card with the binary nVidia kernel module on my Debian desktop with no problems. Don't know about ATi - they're known to have poor OpenGL support under windows.
• The Xircom modem/ether double-height PC-cards are great, under Windows at least, but costly.
• Buy a miniature optical mouse and forget about the on-board nodding-in-a-general-direction device.

I'd also suggest investing in a good laptop back-pack. I got one from Jansport at about £80 and never regretted a pound of it! That's probably the best value. A company called Tubis, or something like that, make more stylish and much less practical ones for only £150-£250 :-) The trick is to wear your backpack confidently during check-in and pretend it weighs only 5kg. If you take it off your back and put it down, they'll probably think of weighing it.

Pavlos