Re: Friendliest Laptop??
> On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 08:39:19PM -0800, Heather wrote:
> > Vendors right off the top of my head: Ascentia (sp?), Imperial, Kachinatech
> > (but the model they sell is far slower than you want), Dell if you twist
> > their arm, ARM Computer. I'm sure there are a few more, maybe I'll bother
> > to look at the hardware howto and narrow it down sometime.
>
> Apple makes laptops that run debian-powerpc quite nicely, but are pretty
> pricey :( Good battery life and no noisy power-sucking fans though.
>
> Ascentia was a line of laptops made by AST. AST is out of business now.
> Good thing, too, according to this tremendously pissed off customer:
> http://www.netppl.fi/~findians/paper.html
The Ascentias are still listed in LAPTOP magazine's chart this last month.
Unless someone else took up the product line, this company failure was recent?
> I don't know if all AST laptops suck as much as this guy says they do, but
> my AST Ascentia 810N is, um, ok. It has a nice trackball, not a little
> mouse nipple in the middle of the keyboard, and it runs cool enough to be
> called a laptop (even for people wearing shorts :). The biggest problem is
> that I can't upgrade the RAM past 20MB :( I got it for only 300 $ last
> year, so I'd say it's worth it.
>
> Anyway, you [Yannick] might want to consider a used laptop unless you have
> a good reason for needing an 800MHz Pentium III. You can get a pretty good
> machine for a whole lot less than you'd pay for a new one. My next laptop
> will probably be a powerpc or an AMD K6-2 (or some other K6-* processor).
Kachinatech's Portare is a KG-2, 3 dif't speeds available, memory total
looked a little wimpy, but acceptible to most needs when pumped up. And
Kachina preloads Debian...
> If you ever need to seriously crunch anything, just ssh to a powerful
> desktop box.
Definitely. Preferably under screen, then power detach and come back
later when its crunching is done.
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
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