Would one of your laptops be right for me?

[OmniDistortion]

I currently have a Toshiba A105 laptop. It's a great machine and honestly there are only two things I dislike about it. It has a Radeon Xpress 200m that has been very difficult to get working and I'm just plain sick of messing with it any longer. Also for the past couple months no matter the OS the USB ports no longer recognize anything other than legacy devices such as my optical mouse I use. Nothing else even acts as if it were plugged in.

Now the things I love about this laptop is that it is really quiet and for the most part very durable as well. The durability doesn't have to be superb as there is warrenty for that, but if it were decent that helps a lot just in case of an accident and I don't want to deal with shipping a laptop out especially if it's my primary computer. I also wish to know if your machines are relatively quiet. Enough so that a person even just a couple seats down from me in a quiet college room wouldn't be able to notice it at all.

Now I don't know if I've just been unlucky but my first laptop was loud, burned up really fast, and eventually died within the first half year. It was very frustrating. It was made to be a real powerhouse laptop though. I really don't want something to be so powerful if it has to sacrifice that with white noise and raging heat.

If these laptops work very well with Ubuntu right off the bat (including the USB and 3D acceleration) and happen to be quiet, cool, and stable then I'd love to have one in the upcoming month. In particular the Serval Performance caught my eye.

[crichell]

hola Omni - I think buying a laptop is always sort of tough. You have great questions that are hard to answer with pictures on a web site. That's why we're here in in the forums.

There are a many things that are important to us. Among them are that we would use our own laptops day in and day out. Quality is of the utmost importance. We warranty all of our machines for up to three years (even past that with extended warranties). That means that if we're putting out crap it cost us lots of money to maintain those warranties (something Dell doesn't have to worry about ((battery recalls)) but we do). It also means that the computer must be quiet and capable. 3D acceleration and direct rendering work on all machines out of the box.

We also work on this stuff all day every day. We're constantly working to add new functionality, capabilities, performance, etc. It doesn't stop when you buy a laptop from us. We spend our time making them better, creating How To's and maximizing the things you can do with your Ubuntu pc.

If you're looking for performance then the Gazelle Performance (w/ nvidia upgrade), Pangolin Performance, or Serval Performance will handle anything you through at them.

[lord trousers]

I have a Pangolin, and it runs cool and quiet. (I know there are fans running, but I can't hear them from more than a foot away.) It's also fast enough to do some pretty heavy number crunching - I do computer vision research. It's a dual-core with gobs of cache and a very snappy FSB.

You'd think I was a sales rep for System76 with how I talk about my laptop. I love it.

[OmniDistortion]

Oh no, it's allright. crichell actually gave the best response I think I could ever hear! These laptops sound very promising and depending on my financial situation by the end of this month I should be getting one. Hopefully those Intel Core 2 Duos should be available for their laptops and I might get one of those or at least one of the older ones if they are too pricey.

[newlinux]

I have the gazelle and it runs pretty cool and quiet too, I often have it running for days at a time (downloading :).