Laptop choices

[ciphergoth]

I finally narrowed the field to a few candidates and mailed my work a comparison chart:

http://hacks.ciphergoth.org/laptop-compare.html

All of them have 256 Mb RAM, a 12.1 inch 1024x768 TFT screen, an Intel PIII-M processor, onboard 56K Winmodem, 2 USB ports, 1 Type II PCMCIA slot, VGA out port, no serial port or floppy drive.

I really want the Portege!

Update: ...but it turns out there aren't any in the UK at all! I just tried all the resellers Toshiba recommends, plus dealtime.co.uk and pricewatch.co.uk, and none of them have them in stock. I just tried Toshiba themselves, and they say they'll contact me when they have them in stock but it could be two to three weeks, which could be a bit problematic. Aargh! If it comes down to the Dell or the IBM, which should I go for? The weight inclines me to the Dell...

Comments

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

Should be fine, it's a standard memory of 256, and you can have sodimms of sizes 64-512mb giving up to 1gb of ram. The thing is, if you want 1gb, you have to pull out their 256mb and put in two 512mb sodimms. But 768mb should be plenty. Good to see they leave one slot free.

Other thing I thought about is to check the hardware in each for linux compatability. Even if you will mainly be running windows, linux compatible hardware is generally better as it has built in processing rather than using 'soft' functionality on the system processor. In particular, have a look at the XFree86 compatability for the graphics