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

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Somehow I missed the line about the ibooks being too heavy. Not that it helps for your search right now, but apparently Apple have heard your concerns.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised - now that they're Intel-based, they have a lot more flexibility. As you can see, I did check out what Apple had to offer, since those machines will run Linux just as well and I'm not unmoved by the seductive power of the Mac side, but I need it under 2kg and I need it now.

I also thought I could head off the inevitable advocacy by checking it out myself and explaining why it didn't meet my needs in advance, but I should have known better...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

:laugh: I don't need it under 2kg, though I guess I need it in about 2 weeks. So, hm.

Urgh. It's hard for me to make any decisions of late. If my job ends without a new one lined up Britain is a tempting next stop after Guatemala. But I need to renew the passport.