Re: Which laptop!!!
On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, [iso-8859-1] Iñaki Martínez wrote:
> Hi!!!
> I want to buy a laptop and i do not know which......
[snip]
Hello, and glad to hear - laptops are mighty handy to[y|ol]s
> Requirements (in order of importance):
>
> * Weight (as less as possible)
> * RAM 256 (128 Minimum)
> * Video if posible **NOT** SHARED memory
> * Linux well supported, PCMCIA, NET, so on.
> * I can buy in Europe if possible in Spain
>
> I have seen this models...
>
> Sony Vaio PictureBook
> Fujitsu P2000 Series
> Asus M2000 Series
> and several others....
From the models you list, it seems like size and weight are of most
importance, not just weight. There are many laptops that are quite light,
but still full sized - just very thin. Personally I never found these to
be "my style" either. I currently own a Sony Picturebook (rather old
model, p266 64MB ram) and I can say that it is a wonderful model.
I must also admit that I've got two dead batteries and two withered
keyboards. The batteries are due to the memory effect - they're not
actually dead, and that is not an issue in newer models. The keyboard(s),
however, I fear *are* a quality concern. When I first got it (used) the
keyboard lasted 14 months - of fairly heavy usage - before keys started
popping off. When that got to be too much, and after a very unsuccessful
attempt with epoxy trying to make them not pop off, I bought a
replacement keyboard. It lasted 4 months. Warranty was 90 days. I was
not pleased.
Now it works as a nice always on low-power desktop hooked up to my kvm.
The shame of this is that I don't get to tote it around, or look at it's
beautiful little display. It also (naturally) swaps when I'm browsing the
web with Opera (quick browser, but a bit of a memory hog) as I run some
services and other things that quickly fill the 64MB ram - definately get
enough ram, I can't stress that enough.
If I were buying today, I would go with the Fujitsu P2XXX series... I
think they recently upped the processor to 933. I would also max out the
ram, though not through fujitsu, I would make sure the minidimm or
whatever it takes was really the largest available.
Remember - laptops don't have much of an upgrade path, but a maxxed out
machine still has plenty of life to it. *AND* while a laptop battery may
eventually become useless, it's still a low power machine [though becoming
less and less so as they continue using desktop processors, that's not an
option in B5 notebooks], and while it's not universally the case, more RAM
can often be more beneficial than more processor [swapping is evil!].
-Martin N.
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