[ale] Opinions on lightweight laptops?

[James Taylor]

I recently bought a Sony Vaio SZ210.  It is feather light, comes with 1GB of RAM, 120GB 5400rpm SATA drive, Centrino Duo 1.83GHZ processor, wireless G, 14.1" 1280x800 w/ 256MB NVIDIA discrete memory 3D accelerated.

Two issues, which I can live with, more or less.

None of the special function keys or the built-in camera and fingerprint reader work, which was no big surprise and not critical for me.  It just gives me a testing platform if I want to try drivers on them.

The second is a bigger issue.  The Marvel Yukon driver I have has problems with buffer overruns when it tries to transfer continuous data on a local network (internet and wan is not a problem).  I see this is a known issue, and there seems to be an effort to fix it.  I generally use the wireless if it's available, with very good throughput.   Tried it out, discovered the problem and returned it, then decided I looked the package so much that I would buy it and wait for the fix.

I'm running SuSE10.1 on it.

-jt



>>> On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at  1:07 PM, in message
<63215.69.17.4.14.1157908032.squirrel at devsea.com>, "John Wells"
<jb at sourceillustrated.com> wrote: 
> Guys,
> 
> I'm tired of lugging around my 8 lbs. Dell Inspiron and have decided to
> purchase a more portable laptop.
> 
> I've been looking at Lenovo...they seem to compete in cost and offer a
> wide variety. Those with 13.3" screens are appealing (they're roughly 3
> pounds), yet I fear writing code, which is primarily what I use it for,
> might be hard on such a low resolution.
> 
> Any recommendations? My only desires are: decently powerful, lightweight,
> capable of running Ubuntu well.
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> 
> 
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