isn't quite ashamed enough to present

jr conlin's ink stained banana

2008-05-27

::CRAP-top.

Dammit.

So, come 7:30AM tomorrow, i'm going to be traveling about. Normally, i tend to greet these sorts of times as a wonderful time to catch up on some coding, but as of this morning my laptop died. (Oddly telling, but that's another discussion.)

i shouldn't be particularly surprised. First, the power adapter died. $70 for a new one of those (and then i managed to score a few extras from a scrap bin). Then, a few months ago, the wireless card in it died and i had to spend $100 replacing it. Then the bottom third of the display kept flaking out on me indicating that one of the LCD ribbons had a short in it. Finally, this morning, it refuses to boot, and dies during the POST checks. Ok, so i paid $800 for it, but i was kinda hoping i'd get more than two years out of the box.

i am now short one laptop.

Of course, since it's me i'm talking about, there's some conditions on whatever laptop i decide to replace this with:

1) i hate Apple.
2) i'm not particularly fond of Sony. (Lest we forget that they're the ones that rooted customer boxes, push for DRM on everything, and otherwise express themselves as less than pleasant corporate citizens).
3) i'm currently less inclined to get another Compaq considering how this one faired. That said, i've got three power adapters and a 12 cell battery that's otherwise not going to be used.

That leaves Lenovo, Toshiba, and a slew of "who the hell are these?" guys.

So, dear lazyweb; got any suggestions for what laptop i should get?

Right, so < $1000 later, i'm now the owner of a Fujitsu Lifebook (AMD dual 64/2GHz, 3GB memory, 200GB drive) running (sadly) Vista home. i'm happily disabling all the useless crap and rebuilding where and what i can. The battery life is only around 2 hours with the stock, and i'm not sure there's an extended life available, but that's fine for most of what i need.

callous
2008-05-27 - 10:20:39

Lenovo X61s (12.1" XGA screen) are quite cheap from their outlet website. I bought one for travel a few months ago. It makes me happy.


JIM
2008-05-27 - 11:10:26

Seeing as how I think I have the same laptop as you, I'm hoping yours was just overripe or something.


Josh
2008-05-27 - 13:30:38

damn, you're a week late — I just sold a Thinkpad z61p because I hate windows (and don't hate Apple like you do). I was happy with the Thinkpad, save for its inability to run MacOS smoothly. Since that is not a concern of yours I'd reccommend Lenovo.


mookie
2008-05-27 - 14:53:59

i have to say, my $400 whitebox "gq" ("great quality") from fry's that i bought a year ago is a surprisingly good machine.

http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2007/04/10/frys-surprise/

the box works very well, it's very compatible with linux, and it hasn't broken yet — and i use the box a lot. "gq" is a "branded" version of an ECS box (which is a big notebook whitebox manufacturer).


jrconlin
2008-05-27 - 17:07:57

JIM: More than likely, i just got a crappy build. It happens. I also tend to be a bit rougher on the beasties than more civilized folk, so I'm sure that didn't help matters.


JustinPie
2008-05-28 - 12:57:46

my condolences on the vista.


Shep
2008-05-28 - 14:29:49

I'm now a full-on Apple convert. Well, not at home, but that's mostly because I'm poor.


Josh
2008-05-28 - 15:14:55

I'm with Shep, except I actually have replaced my hardware with Apple hardware (the Thinkpad I mentioned selling was part of getting a 17" high res Macbook Pro).

Shep, one thing you might look into for home is OSX86. If you get the right CPU/motherboard, it installs fairly cleanly on PC hardware. I am actually running a 2.4GHz Core 2 quad at work that is running MacOS that I built for about $350 and parts I already had… and if you go with a cheaper Core 2 Duo, you can prolly do better than that. The only problem with OSX86 is that even with PC-EFI and the vanilla kernel, auto updates can be tricky.


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