[PLUG] Need laptop recomendations

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 01:07:38PM +0200, Michael Dexter wrote:
> >So you say you need a laptop or PC? Check this out:
> 
> No. He said that he needs a system with specific requirements:
> 
> "What I am looking for is something that has a good warranty, is light, has
> an AMD dual core processor, a fast video card with lots of ram and is not
> over $2000."

Thanks for bringing this back on track.  The good warranty is key;
laptops are tradeoffs, between cost, capability, and reliability.
( "cheap, fast, good - pick two" ).  Alan's price range suggests
that he is willing to pay extra for "fast, good", which shows some
intelligence IMHO. 

I am typing this on a 6 year old IBM T30; it has been repaired three
times but works fine with very heavy use.  The only real problem is
that it is beginning to fall off the back of the Linux driver support
curve - all the drivers work with the 1 year old distro I am using,
but I expect there will be upgrade issues when they stop supporting
this distro 3 years from now. I paid about $1800 for it, and another
$300 for warranty extensions, and that is a much better bargain than
$800 for a junker every 18 months.  Unless filling Chinese landfills
with production debris is part of the attraction of new ...

One of the problems with Linux is that it sometimes takes a while for
the drivers to show up, unless you are really careful to check out
chipset support before purchase ( see http://www.linux-laptop.net/
and http://www.thinkwiki.org/ among others ).  So the sweet spot for
drivers is approximately between 6 months and 5 years after the
appearance of a new laptop.  The junker-every-18-months approach
actually means about 30% of the time you are chasing drivers and
upgrades.  If you gotta, you gotta, but that isn't something I try for.

Alan wants to run AMD - not my choice, and not as popular, but he is
invested in AMD already and I am glad there is someone smart like Alan
supporting that portion of the community.  Since AMD is usually the 
"cheaper" choice, it may be harder to find a high-support good-warranty
laptop with that processor family.  I hope he succeeds, because without
AMD to compete with them, Intel will slack off and abuse customers.
Hooray for the "loyal opposition"!

The bottom line may be that Alan will end up doing his own hardware
maintenance after an inadequate warranty expires.  There are a lot
of part sources out there for repairing laptops ( for example, 
www.acsparts.com , and broken laptops on Ebay ) , and there are
communities of users that do so.  Laptops are more difficult to work
on than desktops, and the parts are more specialized and expensive,
but skilled user maintenance is possible.  Alan's particular problem
(a CPU that overheats) is possibly a problem with the cooling fan,
and sometimes a simple cleaning is enough to get those working again.  

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