[ale] laptop advice needed

Pat Regan thehead at patshead.com
Sat May 23 12:40:55 EDT 2009


Preston Boyington wrote:
> Personally I'm sold on Toshiba with the Acer a close second, but after
> thinking about it would lean toward a Dell laptop because they sell
> loads of them and they are pretty widely adopted by the linux community.
> 

Every time I buy a new laptop for myself I dig pretty hard for a deal.
Dell is just about the only vendor that will give you a pretty good deal
AND let you customize your laptop.

That may not matter to most people, but it makes a huge difference for
me.  At least with regard to the parts you can't upgrade on your own.  I
always want as much resolution as they'll give me and bluetooth.  Dell
always offers reasonably priced machines with the highest DPI displays.

That much said, if you're cheap/frugal like me you'll be careful about
which upgrades you pick from Dell.  If you know what you are doing, I
would buy memory, disk, and possibly battery upgrades from a third party.

The last laptop I priced they wanted to charge $400 to upgrade from an
80 gig drive to (I think/hope) an Intel x25 SSD.  I can buy an x25 of
the same size outright for less than $400 (and the "free" 80 gig would
be a good upgrade for my PS3 :p).

Memory upgrades are usually worse.  Batteries are hit and miss.

Speaking of batteries.  These Inspirons are the first exceedingly common
laptops I have ever owned.  I think I paid about $70 each for a pair of
ebayed 9 cell batteries earlier this year.

As far as Linux goes on them, I can't complain.  We have a pair of
pretty similar Inspiron 6400 laptops here at home that were bought
within a few months of each other.  One is a core 1 duo with a GMA 950
video chip, the other a c2d with a radeon x1400.  Every piece of
hardware has worked out of the box with Ubuntu since I bought them over
2-3 years ago.

Each of my parents have a low end 15 inch Dells.  An Inspiron 1501 and a
Vostro 1100.  At least I think it was an 1100.  They are nearly
identical machines.  The plastic on both is identical except in color,
and the insides are identical except for the processor speed.  Both were
$400 or less, they were the cheapies.

Ubuntu works fine on both.  3D worked out of the box.  They both run
with desktop effects enabled.  I think the integrated video chip is a
Radeon 1150.  It is pretty comparable to the GMA 950.  They both LOVE
the zoom and the "invert color" hotkeys.

Pat

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