Looking at your choices the Portege does look like the best and what I have seen and heard of Toshiba laptops recently its very nice. My SO has a toshiba from a different range than the portege cos she wanted serial/parallel ports and a bigger keyboard. However in light of availability problems eeek.
I am using an 2 or 3 yr old Dell latitude (CPi A range) and despite it being a lovely machine the SODIMMS are not a standard spacing apart so if I wanted to expand the RAM then I'd have to get expensive kingston RAM which is less wide than a standard SODIMM (grr). You might wanna check that if you're going for the RAM expansion options.
I've run slackware and the knoppix distro of linux on this Dell latitude without problems and once I'd updated the BIOS it worked nicely with PCMCIA stuff... Nice keyboard too.
Trying as many of the keyboards out as you can sounds like a good option. I have used laptops since the mid 90's some with less nice keyboards and it really does make all the difference to its overall usability. I don't recall you having especially large or tiny hands but other factors such as irritating shaped enter keys, badly places cursor keys and how similar the keyboard is to your current/familliar machines is an issue I've come across. Your local PCW (spit) often have laptops on display for the keyboard prodding and its amusing to watch them try to sell things to you as if you're stupid.......
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Looking at your choices the Portege does look like the best and what I have seen and heard of Toshiba laptops recently its very nice. My SO has a toshiba from a different range than the portege cos she wanted serial/parallel ports and a bigger keyboard. However in light of availability problems eeek.
I am using an 2 or 3 yr old Dell latitude (CPi A range) and despite it being a lovely machine the SODIMMS are not a standard spacing apart so if I wanted to expand the RAM then I'd have to get expensive kingston RAM which is less wide than a standard SODIMM (grr). You might wanna check that if you're going for the RAM expansion options.
I've run slackware and the knoppix distro of linux on this Dell latitude without problems and once I'd updated the BIOS it worked nicely with PCMCIA stuff... Nice keyboard too.
Trying as many of the keyboards out as you can sounds like a good option. I have used laptops since the mid 90's some with less nice keyboards and it really does make all the difference to its overall usability. I don't recall you having especially large or tiny hands but other factors such as irritating shaped enter keys, badly places cursor keys and how similar the keyboard is to your current/familliar machines is an issue I've come across. Your local PCW (spit) often have laptops on display for the keyboard prodding and its amusing to watch them try to sell things to you as if you're stupid.......
Good luck with machine hunting.
Natalya