[PLUG] Buying Laptops (was HP wierdness...)

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Sat May 28 21:01:38 UTC 2005


Laptop opinions:  The speed of a laptop is measured in human terms
by how long you have to wait to complete a slow calculation.  Worst
case, this is the field service turnaround time... :-(  Thus, the
responsiveness of the company supplying (and eventually repairing)
the laptop should be a big part of your decision, and that is measured
by the experiences of others.

Thus, I am really bummed that HP treated John so ... weirdly.  After
watching IBM's Thinkpad service erode from outstanding to mediocre,
I was hoping that HP would retain a clue.  Keep looking, I guess...

Laptops cram an enormous amount of technology into a tiny case, which
gets much more physical abuse than a typical desktop.  Something has
to give, and it is usually some combination of price and reliability. 
So plan on repairs about once a year, get the extended warranty. 
Make sure that the service organization can find and repair problems,
and do so quickly.  IBM used to be able to ship and repair a laptop
door-to-door in 36 hours, which is why I once was quite loyal to
them, in spite of their higher price.

Plan on buying extra AC adapters, unless you are fond of crawling 
under furniture.  You will probably want a CD-RW so you can write
Knoppix disks for strangers.  It is handy to have a removable hard
drive cage, so when you inevitably send the machine in for service,
you can keep your data.  I have Ultrabay drives for my thinkpads,
so I can swap CD-RW, floppy, and second hard drive.

One thing that I don't want is built-in modems and built-in wifi,
Linux drivers or not.  Modems connect to phone wires, which are
often exposed to lightning and other nasties.  I prefer to connect
through an easily replaceable PCMCIA card.  Built-in wifi chipsets
are usually 20mW or under, and often have driver problems, while
PCMCIA cards such as the Senao 200mW Prism2 card have good driver
support and much greater reach.  And when you eject the card, you
can be sure that the network is disconnected;  this is harder to
verify with software-controlled built-in Wifi.

But before buying anything, ask another Linux user who has the
model you are contemplating.  That is why the Linux for Laptops
website is useful.  Life is too short to spend it chasing down
X drivers for oddball video chipsets.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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