Re: Yet another "what laptop should I buy?" question

[Frédéric Bothamy <fbothamy@mail.dotcom.fr>]

* Jérôme Marant <jmarant@nerim.net> [2002-12-12 22:25] :
> 
> Hi,
> 
>   I know this is a common question on this list but there are
>   so many laptops available in the world that it is pretty hard
>   to make up one's mind.

Maybe I am a bit late ...

My Compaq Presario 711 EA works well: no problem with audio, video,
touchpad, network, USB. I had however to test various ACPI patches to get
one which would work OK, but latest are OK.

- Price: ~1500 euros (6 months ago)
- Weight: ~3kgs
- Autonomy: ~2h45 (at best, much less if heavily used)
- Correct linux support (despite bad DSDT tables from Compaq), Woody
  installs out-of-the-box
- Powerful enough for me (Duron 950 MHz)
- I usually am on debian-user-french (no, this one does not count ;-))

It is not available any more, but the new Presario 732 should be
fairly similar.

I do have to admit that the autonomy is less than what you want, that
I do not use suspend and that I have not tested Compaq's (and now HP)
support on this laptop. The only major drawback for me was to have to
pay for WinXP (I used it to check that everything was working).

I don't have any interest in Compaq/HP, I just use my laptop every
day.

Fred