Phoenix Network Forums

Lets talk about laptops...
I am thinking of buying a laptop. I was thinking on something like a 1,5ghz centrino procesor and 512DDR... These two are the most important for me, because I dont have much money and I wont need it for playing games... Anyway, how good is the Intel Graphics Accelator card 900? And also, is it OK to buy a AMD turion insted of a Intel? Any other things that should be careful when buying?

thanks

As far as I know the AMD mobile CPUs need much more energy, so if you're going to use laptop's battery most of the time it will be better to buy one with Interl CPU. Good brands are Toshiba, Fujitsu-Siemens and Sony of course (but are expensive ;(). The Dell ones are good too but a firns told me that they put some sort of a spyware or something like that.

Spyware or not, Dell puts about 10 gigs of trash on your machine. If you decide to go with Dell, format the drive and reinstall whatever OS you plan on using.

10giga whoow. thers gota be something useful in that 10gb ?
so how does that laptop cost ?
is there someting good for 600e

uhmmmm, it's quite difficult to find a cheap ultraportable notebook.
what's your budget? do you prefer internal or external optical drive?
the integrated graphic chip works fine with 2d applications, but cannot run most 3d games.

Dells go for as low as $550 during promotion specials. That's supercheap for a laptop.

10 gigs.. Well, I didn't find them very useful.. The reason there is so much crap in their computer is because they're trying to make you use their products rather than the industry equivalents everybody's used to. I would never use Dell Jukebox, for example, because I have my preffered audio and video players.

Then there is their diagnostic center, or something like that, a worthless piece of garbage they use to "fix your computer".

Stuff like that.

well, computers have different prices at different countries... I think Slovenia is not one of the cheapest... Like the cheapest you get is approx. 800€... Now the problems with dell don't bother me, any OS that will be I will replace with Kubuntu Linux... Also Dell laptops are quite expensive in Slovenia, from 1200€ on... What about HP? People say they are also pretty good...

SqlByte wrote:10giga whoow. thers gota be something useful in that 10gb ?
so how does that laptop cost ?
is there someting good for 600e

Of Topic...yes there are.... linux drivers for some equipment

On Topic... try to get an IBM T23, its only p3 but on 133Mhz bus, there are cheap... and the 1,2Ghz models are sufficiently efficient for a mobile computer

what about drivers? are there any known problems with laptops? i am thinking on modems, graphic cards, etc... I found out they don't "wake up" if you put them to "sleep"...

If you are going to put Kubuntu on the machine, then the whole sleep thing becomes a question of whether or not the ACPI daemon included with Kubuntu can interface properly with the laptop BIOS. I would suggest finding good laptops first, in terms of specs, and then googling for "linux [laptop name]" to see issues that linux users have had to overcome in order to get full functionality for the laptop. You could also try contacting the Kubuntu developers themselves to see if they have anything to say about it.

Debian based distro's are quite flexible.
But Gentoo should run on it if you have no other choise.
Slackware has quite some driver support, and mandrake/mandriva to.

nene wrote:what about drivers? are there any known problems with laptops? i am thinking on modems, graphic cards, etc... I found out they don't "wake up" if you put them to "sleep"...

hehe, I remember old time problem with the Lucent modem on Toshiba Sattelite

bart416 wrote:Debian based distro's are quite flexible.
But Gentoo should run on it if you have no other choise.
Slackware has quite some driver support, and mandrake/mandriva to.

well, gentoo is a option for me too... People say its quite hard to install it but i'll give it a try if Kubuntu wont work properly...

Don't go overboard on graphics cards for a laptop. Just make sure that whatever card it comes with is compatible with whatever operating system you plan to run.

how do i know if it is? i planning to go with ATI Radeon mobility 9700 64MB...