On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:48, Douglas Royds wrote: > Key buying criteria for me would now be: > > 1. Price (as always) > 2. Has anyone published a success-with-this-laptop page (see > www.linux-on-laptops.com, and do a general Google search)? Will the > modem work? Will the ACPI (power management) work? What about built-in > 802.11? > 3. Some confidence in the brand - reviews, talking to other victims. > 4. Battery life
I would highly recommend a Dell Latitude XPi CD ;-) Ok, so it's a P166 with 32MB of ram, but it does the job (and for a good 2 hours without recharging). And I didn't pay too much for it, thus satisfying condition 1 ;-) Running fluxbox, on gentoo. Performance is not too shabby (seriously :) - with gaim / bitchx / xterm / xclock (now I'm getting desperate :) open, it'll still open, say, slypheed, in about 4 or 5 seconds. Email (slypheed) / web browsing (links) / IM / programming / document editing (latex or abiword), it's all very useable really. I just try not to 'emerge -u world' too often ;-) Seriously, if you don't want to play games (and laptops suck for games anyway, unless as Nick says you get a decent graphics card in it :) then think about what it is you really need it for. If price is a factor, and you only want to do simple desktop tasks on it, you can pick up secondhand laptops on trademe with at least double my specs for petty cash these days. Worth considering maybe. Do you _really_ need to run KDE? :) Cheers, Gareth
