Buying a laptop

[ciphergoth]

A few months ago I poured coffee into my beloved Thinkpad, and the screen died. It turns out that no-one can get hold of replacement screens for a ThinkPad X30, which is a bit sad. I've been using Jess's laptop in the meantime, but she's getting a bit sick of it, and anyway I need one to take to Belgium. I don't like to buy big expensive things without gathering the wisdom of the lazyweb!

I have only one really strong requirement: it has to be light. Around 1.5kg is good, lighter is better, anything above 2kg is right out. In particular, please don't advocate any Apple laptop that weighs above 2kg, which I think is all of them.

The next most important thing is battery life. Everything else is just the usual tradeoff of features and suchlike. All light laptops have 1024x768 screens, except the Dell/Samsung WXGA ones that have 1280x768. All laptops you can buy new come with Bluetooth, WiFi, built-in Ethernet, and so on. 512Mb RAM will be plenty for most of the things I want to do. It doesn't seem to be possible to determine for sure which ones support WPA2, sadly; I'm just hoping that means they all do. Similarly, it seems to be very hard to find out how good they will be with Linux, but they're all usually OK. I'm assuming the warnings against Vaios from a couple of years ago stand (I've done this before).

Any recommendations? A whole bunch of options are listed here. So far these seem to be the main contenders:

Model	Price	Mass	Battery life	Notes
Dell Latitude X1	£1042	1.15kg	3h06	1280x768 screen. I am typing at one right now!
Toshiba Portege M300	£1012	1.6kg	6h10
Toshiba Portege R200	£1262	1.3kg	4h40	updated to add this one - seriously seductive shiny and current favourite

I welcome your thoughts! But please let me re-iterate: DON'T TELL ME TO BUY A MAC!. I know it's an inevitable consequence of pretty much any computer-related question, but I did specifically ask for a reason.

Comments

[ephermata.livejournal.com]

LinuxCertified now manufactures laptops, preloads them with Linux (your choice of several distributions), and tests that things actually work. I recently bought their LC2210D (5lb 14' screen model) and am pleased overall. They have a lighter model, the LC2100, which may be worth a look.

http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux-laptop-lc2100.html

Unfortunately it's 1.9kg, which is at the upper end of your range. A 512MB, 40GB, 1.6 Pentium M looks like it'll cost about US$1248 (while there is a Centrino driver on SourceForge, they only preconfigure and support the prism mini-PCI card, which is US$99 extra). Plus shipping, of course. May be worth an e-mail to find out what they can do for you.

My LC2210D seems to get 4-5 hours of battery life, but I don't know if the 2100 uses the same battery. Other than that, most things have "just worked" with Fedora Core 3, which was their "recommended" distribution. I'm now happily latexing and coding away in cafes all over town. This is so much better than Slackware on a 1997 Fujitsu. :)

The only thing that is really disappointing is the support for 802.11 networking -- KWiFiManager is missing a shared library and won't run; the LinuxCertified people suggest using waproamd, but they don't preinstall it. Also, as far as I can tell, only support for WEP, not even WPA1. Still, you can associate with open 802.11 networks fine using iwconfig or the GUI configurator, and the hardware (prism54) appears to support WPA2 if I upgrade the driver. I haven't gotten around to either yet; I only use a few wireless networks and haven't needed it. I don't know if this problem happens with their other supported distributions. The software suspend is also clunky, but this appears to be a problem with all Linux laptops and so is more forgiveable.

Other things - usually quiet except when compiling (it has a daemon
running that understands speedstep), keyboard is OK but not the best I've ever had, trackpad instead of trackpoint (big adjustment for me after a ThinkPad!).