Laptop Advice.

[ihavenoname]

Hello, I am thinking of buying a laptop sometime this year and I need some advice. I have never purchased a laptop for myself, so I am summoning the wisdom of the forum to help me in my quest. (sry...just had to say that.) Back on topic, my tech specs are something like this

100gb hard drive (at least)
1gb ram (at least)
processor(I know nothing about this, preforably one that has a balance between speed and battery lifetime (or..yea...)
- One thing I DO know...NO CELERON!!!!!

video card- I HOPE it would be an Nvidia, just for linux, but that is not a must, just as long as I would be able to (maybe) get XGL running on it. Again this is not THAT important. I am not sure if I will put linux on it right away...so yea ( no offense I just might not have the time to set things up at first...)


umm, yea Ill add things as they come to me. Also if someone has an idea where they can find good quality/cheap laptops which have no OS on them that would be great.

Final (but important) note: I would like for this laptop to be between $0 (yea right) and $8xx ($900 is almost pushing it). I hope my specs will work out with that budget. Though I could save and get one with more, I would feel weird carrying a $1000 object around...

[Wallakoala]

I would say as far as processors go, get a pentium m. They are nice processors for laptops. They are supposed to be very quiet and have nice battery life. Don't get one with a pentium 4 cause then it will be really loud and hot.

Also, check out http://www.system76.com/
They have some nice laptops preloaded with ubuntu.

[GuitarHero]

I would also look at System76, but also check out Asus laptops. I think you can find them without windows so you dont have to pay for it.

[ihavenoname]

Hmm, I added that I did not want a Celeron because, I really don't like the performance of celerons. Also, though I think System 76 is an excellant place to go for computer needs, they are too expensive for me...

[ihavenoname]

What do you all think of Dell Gateway Compaq/HP laptops?

[etc]

What do you all think of Dell Gateway Compaq/HP laptops?

I personally wouldn't even consider buying a laptop from those companies, after my experience with their support and build quality. But who knows, they could have improved since the last time I purchased from them about five years ago.

[prizrak]

Go for a Lenovo Thinkpad, they play nice with Linux and have decent power. If you want a powerful machine for gaming and such Core Duo is something to look at. The battery life won't be as good, if you are not planning on gaming then a Pentium M will be good. They get nice battery life and have decent power.

You won't be able to get a laptop with a 100+GB HDD and 1+GB RAM cheaply anywhere. RAM might be fairly cheap and easy to get depending on how the laptop is designed. HDD is tricky because laptop drives tend to be slower than desktop drives and are of course physically smaller so harder to put capacity into, which drives the prices up. If you have a desktop you might be better off just getting a desktop drive of large capacity as they are pretty cheap nowadays.

[darkhatter]

my gateway hates linux, thats just because of the nvidia board which nvidia claims has drivers for in the 6.17 series of kernel. I'll have to wait for slackware 11 to get released then I'll have to play with that.

The gateway was a great laptop I just have to wait for linux.

and nvidia geforce go 6100 does not work with the open source driver, I haven't tried the ones of the site but I hope it works with those.

go for one of the thinkpads they WILL work with linux, and you can always wait for the thinkpads with suse on them, that way you can help novell :D

[Brunellus]

Suggestion: focus carefully on what the INTENDED USE of a laptop is.

If you intend to do work on the road, then you should privilege portability (size/weight) and battery life over 'performance.' Simply going after the most heavily-specified notebook possible is, in my opinion, silly: what's the point of paying over the odds for a "portable" computer that weighs 4 or 5 kg?

[jdong]

For laptop video cards, I actually do not recommend Nvidia, because their linux drivers do not support dynamic frequency scaling. That translates into very poor battery life in Linux.


ATI's recent mobility radeons (x1x00-series) work quite well under Linux (I own one), and as always, Intel GMA950 is a great choice if you don't game intensively.




For laptops, I highly recommend an Intel Centrino or Centrino Duo -- you're gonna have much better luck getting all the hardware working well under Linux. If you can find any Core Duo or Core 2 Duo processors in your price range, they are excellent workhorses, and get no worse battery life than their single-core relatives. If you can't afford it, the Pentium M is also a very nice chip.


As you said yourself, don't skimp on RAM. Nowadays, I recommend 1GB as a minimum. More RAM only makes your system run smoother.



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834115246


Just for reference, I linked you my laptop. I know it's out of your price range, but for the performance you get out of it, it's worth considering. For me, it's replaced my desktop as my primary system, and I'm a pretty demanding computer user. It runs Ubuntu very well, and IMO it's still probably the best value (I purchased it a few months back, and since then they've upgraded the video to an x1600 from an x1400). There's a few of us here on the forums with this laptop, and we've thoroughly documented running Ubuntu on the system in our forum thread (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=121125)

[prizrak]

For laptop video cards, I actually do not recommend Nvidia, because their linux drivers do not support dynamic frequency scaling. That translates into very poor battery life in Linux.
Now you are making me want to load Windows and test my battery life on my system. It was formated with Dapper as soon as it arived :)


For laptops, I highly recommend an Intel Centrino
Centrino and Pentium M are the same thing. Centrino just means that the board, the chipset, the NIC and WNIC are all made by Intel. That is great for Linux as they all work very well with it.

[jdong]

Centrino and Pentium M are the same thing. Centrino just means that the board, the chipset, the NIC and WNIC are all made by Intel. That is great for Linux as they all work very well with it.

Well, I was unsure if anyone made pentium M's with non-Centrino platforms. I'm more interested in Centrino as the chipset and NIC/wireless package, as the Centrino name guarantees you won't get some obscure-name wireless card that won't work well under Linux :)

[mips]

Another vote for Thinkpads !

[K.Mandla]

What do you all think of Dell Gateway Compaq/HP laptops?
I've worked with lots of HPs and Compaqs. I've owned plenty of Dells, from low-end Latitudes to XPS machines. I have no complaints about any of them, so long as you take the time to make sure the hardware they're selling you is compatible with the OS you want.

Having said that, if I was going to get a brand-spanking-new laptop and I knew for a fact I was going to put Ubuntu on it, I wouldn't hesitate to go straight to system76. I haven't owned one, but to hear others talk about theirs, it would be at the top of my list.

[jdong]

I'm pseudo OK with dells, but with new-age HP and Compaq, I've seen a surprising number of hard disk failures. The same applies even more to Toshiba.