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Laptop Hunting
I'm in the market for a laptop. Been looking for a few months. The one I have is . . . too old. 6+ years old. Turned it on the other day and got a slight shock where the power cord runs into the cracking chassis at the connection between the screen/hinges and the body. Still runs, but man. Ouch. So, I'm in the market for a replacement. If I find one, it'll be my one real Christmas present. I'll be doing development on it, general desktop usage, and (ideally) the stuff described below in bonus #2.
I have the following critical requirements:
1) Must run Linux. I don't want to repeat the hardware issues of my Toshiba Satellite 2805-S603. I want something that isn't broken for Linux. This usually means excellent support for all areas of ACPI. As far as which Linux it'll run . . . Gentoo is desired. Well, duh. 
2) Cheap. Under $700 (ideally under 500-600), including tax, shipping, and any upgrades. If it's really cheap; I can just buy a new cheap one in a few years.
3) Light. Ideally about 5 pounds. Lighter is better. Current laptop about 12 to 17 pounds. If thrown, will flatten most small pets. Not that I've tried.
4) Battery life. 3 hours minimum, I think. What's with today's laptops, many of which boast "Up to 2 hours!" "Up to 1.5 hours!" "Up to 5 minutes!". Are we going back to the dark ages in laptop technology? Heck, even my old laptop had almost 2.5 hours at its prime, and it sucks juice like a dehydrated Californian on a smoothie.
5) Wireless built-in. Something natively Linux-compatible; no ndiswrapper! Must work with WPA.
6) Video. Must have at least a 14.1" screen. 15.4" would be better; I'm looking for an upgrade of my current 15", 1024x768 laptop. Also, the video hardware must be able to do smooth 2D; enough for perfect DVD playback, or other video playback. Also, though I don't currently use any, the capability for smooth accelerated eyecandy is ideal. You never know; I may want it in the future. Would like to have the ability available. However, please don't throw video driver drama at me. I'd like to stay away from that at all costs.
7) Sound. Please, please let the sound work. This includes headphone and microphone jacks.
8) Portage & desktop power. My current laptop is a 1ghz Pentium3 with 128MB RAM. It's not enough to compile anymore. This is why I only sync it once every few months, if ever. It's just not enough to do anything anymore, desktop-wise. Even Fluxbox feels like too much, as well as being useless compared to my beloved Xfce. Everything gtk+ or Qt-based (including applications) runs slooowly. I need something that will make running Gentoo worthwhile. Just Enough Power (JEP) to last until the next upgrade a few years down the road. I learned my lesson about trying to "future-proof" a laptop in 2001. Spent like $2500+ for the absolute-top-of-the-line laptop bundle. Look where it got me. 
The following are optional maximally awesome bonuses:
1) Dual-core. Excellent in and of itself, and related to:
2) DAW. Powerful enough to work as a digital audio workstation. I'm not sure if a low-end single-core Celeron or VIA processor is enough for that. And I'd need to pack a USB-to-MIDI cable, I know. I'd like to start doing some serious composing, recording, and arranging on my piano, which is currently way across the room from my desktop workstation. Much easier to take the complete portable workstation to the nonportable piano, rather than the other way around.
3) Working suspend. Not actually a requirement for my laptops. Weird, isn't it? I always just do cold shutdowns and starts.
4) 3D games! Would be nice if I could play Linux games based on the old-school ones. Stuff like Tremulous, Quake, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, and various old(er) Windows games via Wine. My current laptop can do this, though it only has a 16MB nVidia GeForce2 Go chip. Makes even some of these games painful. It's still powerful enough to kick blackace and latexer's collective butts at Tremulous! 
If the replacement laptop can even (gasp) deliver UT2004, I'm sold.
* * *
So. I'm hunting for a new, used, refurbished, or recertified laptop. One that meets the above critical criteria, and maybe even some of the optional bonuses. I have yet to find anything truly attractive from the big names such as Dell, IBM/Lenovo Gateway, HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Sony, etc. But it's possible I've missed something. Any suggestions? What portable computing devices have made you happy?
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14 comments
Man, have I paid dearly for that cr*p 4-5 years ago :o/
At the moment, best update candidate I could find is MSI's GX700 with WUXGA screen option (1920 x1200). A bit cheaper alternative might be GX710 which hosts AMD x2 + ATI card instead of C2D + nVidia.
It costs 1000-1600 EUR ( depending on the options), but what can you do - you have to pay for quality.
Those big 17" machines usually can't have great battery autonomy, but experience has shown that one can't rely on manufacturers figures anyway. If nothing else, Li-Ions degrade pretty fast if you push them to the limits, so its best not to rely on batteries too much.
Besides, machine with seripous horsepower has to get its juice from somewhere and batteries have their limits, especially in such constrained volume...
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
I've got also 1M5 (with Core Due) - runs very good too.
One pitfall is with jack output - it requires alsa-driver >= 1.0.15 or 2.6.24 kernel.
I can vouch for my Sony Vaio FE-790 (the successor is the FZ series, and it's very much like this one, from what I can tell). Price is pretty good (mine was $1600, but you can get a better one for less now).
Linux runs great :) Sony is definitely doing some strange crap in the bios, but it doesn't seem to break anything. Shrug. It doesn't report battery charge/discharge time, so I have to guess how long I have left, but it's not a big deal.
Cost: Mine was $1600 when I got it 15 months ago. You can get better for cheaper now.
Weight's about 6 lbs or so.
Battery: You're not going to be able to find a 15.4" that gets 3 hours, I'm afraid, unless it's crippled in every other way. I get ~1.5 hours in normal use (wireless on, music playing).
Wireless: Mine has an Intel 3945 a/b/g, the new ones have Intel 4965's. No problems with it at all (now, anyway.. when I first got it, the driver was pretty buggy, but it's much improved, and the new one (based on the new mac80211 subsystem) is even better) The card requires a running binary daemon with the stable driver, unfortunately, but the new mac80211 one does not require it.
Sound: Has the typical hda-intel thing. Had some problems with sound output with alsa 1.0.13, but the problems disappeared with 1.0.14 and haven't come back. The mic doesn't seem to work (I don't really need it) but some googling revealed that it's a persistent problem with hda-based cards, and there seem to be work-arounds. Shrug.
Power: No problems here. I have a dual-core 2.16Ghz (core 2 duo). I use mostly gtk stuff (xfce, epiphany for a browser) but everything's pretty snappy. I could use a bit more ram (I got 1GB in 1 stick so I could upgrade it, but I haven't gotten around to it yet).
Suspend and hibernate both work with few problems. Wireless sometimes doesn't come right back on hibernate, but I mostly just suspend.
3D games: I play Nexuiz all the time. My friend runs one of the few west-coast-usa servers (fihn ftw!). I played Portal in wine with all graphics stuff on in DX8 mode. HL2 runs pretty smoothly (with most stuff turned off) in DX7. I haven't tried, but I imagine that UT2004 would run just fine. I'm definitely not worried about UT3- I'll be getting it as soon as the linux installer becomes available.
Most recent Thinkpads have at least intel x3100 gpu, which handles dvd nicely, and can support ut2004. And if you really want there are models with gpus from nvidia ;)
Look at some Thinkpad t61 model, you cant go wrong there.
Way too expensive! And not enough battery life.
@Aniruddha:
The EeePC fails my requirements in that the screen is much too small. My eyes aren't that good. I know that historically Thinkpads are supposed to be great, but how great can they be if lm_sensors doesn't work? I want my hardware monitoring, dangit! :)
@Nelchael:
Thanks, I'm through with Toshiba. I don't think you could pay me to use one again. Just too broken; too many weird BIOS and ACPI issues. But thanks for the link. :)
@Mike:
Sonys are too big and heavy, and have no real battery life. Given that their purpose is serious media usage, that's probably fine for most people, but most other laptops get at least two hours of battery life. I don't want to estimate remaining time! Also, there are some laptops that get 3 hours or more, though those are mostly VIA C7-M based laptops, which aren't too common.
Not sure what your issue with the microphone is; my desktop has built-in Intel HDA, and the microphone ports work just fine, both in back and via the front ports.
@Andreas, @Kevin:
See my earlier comment regarding Thinkpads. :)
Actually, integrated Intel graphics sound just fine; I'm starting to become attracted to the idea of working open-source drivers. But the tradeoff is less graphical power. They aren't going to beat an nVidia chip. Then again, I've seen plenty of issues with the latest versions of nvidia-drivers on my laptop. The 96xx series hardlocks the screen on first boot, forcing a restart. And other issues too numerous to mention. The last truly working, pain-free nVidia drivers were the very early 1.0.7x series, and some of the even older ones.
Especially if you use cryptoprotection on your filesystem, which is for notebook VERY advisable.
Given the configuration, this MSI is very cheap.
I haven't bought it yet mainly because:
- my old Toshiba is still ( barely ) alive and I don't have immediate reason to throw it away and since those things do make progress, its's best to wait till the last moment.
-I want quadcore in my notebook and at the moment neither Intel nor AMD has an adequate offer. I seek something like Clevo 900C ( notebook with normal machine CPU), but with new generation AMD or Intel true QC chip, like PHenom or Nehalem.
Everyone has his own ideas about optimal notebook. For me, it has to approach capabilities of my stationary machine.
If I feel cramped, I can't work.
I have to have big screen with plenty of resolution, fast CPu with good GPU and _PLENTY_ of HDD space, so I can take many docs etc materials with me at all times.
With these specs it's obvious that I can't have long battery life, but since power oultlet is always available, batteries in my notebook play more of the role of UPS in case of power outage than a serious mobile energy source.
If you can work with 1280x800 graphics, more powah to you, but once I have tried really good 1600x1200 on 15 inch screen, I want nothing less.
They make great machines, that follow standards and look great (imho).
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