Thinking of buying a new laptop
Posted by Sayamindu 1 year, 1 month ago
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 :-).
Get a ThinkPad X60 or X60s. I got my X60 (100 GB HD, 1 GB RAM plus one free slot for a 2 GB chip, Dual Core2Duo T5600 1.83 GHz, i945 graphics, all free drives) on eBay (brand new, unpacked, three years warranty) for $1800, shipping to Poland included. http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X60
Gaah. s/drives/drivers
Broadcam wifi sux, either you have to use ndiswrapper and the proprietary windows driver, either bcm43xx that is limited to 11Mbit/s.
You should have a look to Samsung Q35 which:
- has very good battery (6 cells, more than 6 hours autonomy with wifi disabled)
- is full intel, so without any proprietary stuff
- is light and 12 inch screen.
Ah, right, and the X60 I bought sports an 8-cell battery.
BTW: The ‘RSS Feed’ button for comments feed is broken, the link misses the /ramblings/ part.
…and where I wrote ‘unpacked’ I meant quite the opposite; it was factory wrapped. It’s not one of my best days, not by a long shot.
You’ve also the Dell Latitude D420. Everything running under Linux and with battery 9-cells I’ve up to 7 hours of autonomy.
well, you mentioned dell, and later today (5/24/07) they will officially star selling some systems with Ubuntu pre-loaded, so one would hope everything would work wonderfully. dell.com/open
cheers
Don’t buy an HP.
I have an HP nx6125. Broadcom wifi - reverse engineered. ATI X200M - not fully supported by xorg driver. Crappy ACPI and crappy APIC. Basically it’s badly built.
Buy Dell and get intel hardware. Why reward broadcom/HP/nVidia for not helping linux.
I’m fairly happy with my M1210 - I’ve got the NVidia GF 7400go and suspend works using the binary NVidia driver but hibernate doesn’t (though the laptop doesn’t use much power in suspend mode).
The integrated webcam works with the uvcvideo driver, wireless works fairly well - i think any problems I’m seeing are due to my AP.
Volume hotkeys and screen brightness fn shortcuts also worked without any effort.
Feisty runs very nicely whilst Vista was painful even on the T7400 with 4mb L2 cache.
Overall quite a nice laptop, though I’m not really using the NVidia graphics and the Intel might have been a better choice - lower power consumption and open drivers.
How about Toshiba U200 ? … I’ve tested one with Ubuntu 7.04 and it had worked perfectly.
I second X60. Nice hardware and even suspend to ram is working properly with Ubuntu Feisty.
I got the Fujitsu Siemens Si1520 [1] a few months ago, it’s been working great with Kubuntu.
Best regards,
Aron
[1] http://fujitsu-siemens.com/home/products/notebooks/amilo_si_1520.html
Fujitsu Siemens has got a bunch of 12.1″ laptops (Amilo Pro Vxxxx’s). Couple of them are Intel all the way. Gma950, core2duo, ipw3945abg, e1000, etc. Also, you should be able to get them with 2 year on-site replacement warranty with rather small money. The prices are quite aok for the sheer quality that they offer. Please do check the available models out.
http://www.christopherfischer.net/?p=44
Give it a look and follow the full review link, they come as 12″ lightweights as well.
Also, they’re cheap.
@Shot
I would love to have the X60. However, in India, they sell it for around 3000 USD. And shipping costs to India are prohibitively high - and customs has a tendecny of stopping everything. They even stopped a package addressed to me, containing 20 Ubuntu CDs and demanded that I pay some kind of tax to get the CDs.
@Simon
Samsung unfortunately does not sell laptops in our country.
@Philip, Peter
Yeah - Dell seems to be the most sensible option right now. However, I’ll wait for a month or so to see if the XPS M1210 gets a Santa Rosa update or not.
@vd
Toshiba is somehow extremely overpriced here, and they don’t sell the latest models.
@Aron, droobie
I couldn’t find anything on Fujitsu Siemens in India :-(.
Nice…
Nice…
Nice!
Nice…
Cool!
Ubntu rocks on my Tx1000!
Ubntu rocks on my Tx1000!
interesting
Cool!