[kwlug disc.] looking for techie thoughts on laptops

[Andrew Kohlsmith (lists)]

On August 4, 2008 01:05:19 pm Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   a friend is sending her son off to college this fall, and needs to
> get him a laptop.  i pointed her at tigerdirect.ca and told her to
> poke around.  she came back asking about an acer celeron-based laptop
> for $640. celeron.  gack.  so i suggested she check out a refurbished
> gateway, of which i have a number and all of which have behaved pretty
> well so far.

What's wrong with a Celeron?  The guy's gonna be running office apps, not 
Unreal Tournament.

On that note though... I would agree to stay away from the used laptops unless 
they come with a solid warranty.  Batteries are just the start.  Dim LCD 
backlights, screwy keyboards, iffy CDROM/DVD... and older processors just do 
not seem to have the power savings that the new ones do.

On that note, I picked up a Toshiba U300 series.  13.3" so it's pretty small, 
but decent (not great, but decent) resolution (1280x800), SATA, wifi, 
bluetooth... it's all there and works great with Linux.  Hell even the 
hibernate works.

It was $700 from Staples, and I spent another $30 to get rid of the 
god-forsaken bilingual keyboard.  It's not quite as solid as the Thinkpad T61 
I had at my last job, it runs a little hotter, but it is smaller and 3h 
battery life even with wifi going is nothing to sneeze at.

I'd strongly suggest scouting the Future Shop, Staples, Best Buy specials, and 
stay way from the refurb market unless, as I said, full no-quibble warranty 
is included.

>   thoughts on, say, the tradeoff between an intel duo core, and an AMD
> turion?  beyond that, getting at least 2G of RAM and at least 160G of
> HD seems adequate.

This one came with either 512M or 1G, but I put 4 in it shortly after buying 
it.  80G HDD was what it came with, and I haven't come close to filling it 
yet.

There is something to be said for having a little laptop.  It 
fits "width-wise" into the plastic bins they use at airport security, and I 
can tuck it into a regular sized binder  I just wish I could fit a cell 
access modem *in* it, instead of in the expresscard slot.  I absolutely hate 
dongles or anything sticking out of my laptop!

-A.