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

You should buy a Mac because...

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

No, just joking. They don't seem to make ultralight Linux machines. Shame because their other proucts are... No, joking again.

Here are some additional considerations you might want to apply:

• Which ones are physically pleasant to hold, look at, etc. without annoying design features, flashing lights etc?


• Which ones have a very highly usable keyboard and pointing device?


• Which ones are the most portable including the power supply and any bits needed to connect peripherals.


• Which ones are pleasant to use on your lap or in bed, in terms of balance, heat dissipation, shape, etc?


• Which ones feel like they'd break only after you dropped them on the floor five times?


• Does your OS use mm coordinates? If so get the highest resolution screen, else get the one whose native resolution suits your eyes.


• Do you use external drives? If so get one with a full-size FireWire socket so you can attach drives up to about 200GB without additional power.


• Do you make presentations? If so get one with a real (not proprietary) VGA or DVI socket.


• Can you afford UMTS (3G)? If so get one with a PC-card or with high-speed bluetooth (128kbps or better).


• Can you be bothered travelling with spare batteries? If so get one where you can replace the battery without plugging in or rebooting.


• Do you use Skype or something similar? If so get one with tolerable built-in speakers and (more important) microphone, and make sure it runs quiet to avoid picking up fan noise.