I have been toying with the idea of buying a new notebook for sometime, and my main criteria are the following:

• Lightweight (I have to travel a lot, and I get intermittent back pains at times)
• Small (12.1 inch would be ideal)
• As much RAM and hard disk space as possible
• In the INR 80K-90K range

..and of course, the things should be easily available in India. I don’t want a “desktop replacement”, as they call it. However, ability to run jhbuild occasionally in the background while I do my daily work (Exaile, Gmail, Xchat, Vim) would be nice.

The two main candidates atm are Dell XPS M1210 (Core 2 duo processor, Intel graphics/wifi, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB hdd, etc) and the HP tx1000 (Turion X2 processor, Nvidia graphics, Broadcom wifi, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB hdd). Presently I am leaning more towards the tx1000 due to

• Tablet features
• Cheaper and lighter than the XPS
• Comes with two batteries included in the package, a 4 cell one and a 6 cell one, so I can choose which one to carry with me

However, the main drawbacks of the tx1000 are

• Nvidia graphics (non free drivers, and I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to get suspend/resume working properly with this)
• Broadcom wifi (according to Ubuntu forums, bcm43xx works, but this can differ from model to model)

Moreover, since this is newer machine (compared to the XPS M1210), there’s not much information that Google throws up when I search for HP tx1000 Linux. The only source of useful information seems to be this thread at Ubuntu Forums. The XPS M1210 on the other hand, is a tried and tested machine, and it seems to work nicely with Linux no matter what the distro is.

Does anyone have any experience with trying to run Linux on the tx1000 ? Moreover, I could find very little information on the Turion X2 TL 60 processor – how significant is the difference in performance between a Core 2 duo processor (say, a T7200) and this one ? Comments/suggestions would be very helpful .

After behaving weirdly for almost a month, my BSNL broadband connection finally died today. And while trying to switch to my backup, I discovered that I have left my Reliance CDMA mobile’s data cable at college. So right now I am only left with a very slow GPRS connection from Airtel (though thankfully it’s unlimited),ie no bar on data transfer. Reply to mails, messages, etc will be slow till BSNL restores my broadband connection.