Oh, mighty LJ Brain: Sell me on a laptop

[elfs]

Kusanagi is a Thinkpad T23 and have served me well for two years now. But, it was old when I bought it, I have been living at the edge of its diskdrive space for years now, and both the age and the lack of drive space are starting to show. It's just barely fast enough to show movies, but it's unreliable when running the S-Video output, and the battery's old, and it locks up now and then under very heavy load.

I have been thinking about buying a new laptop. Omaha and I have discussed the budget, and basically the best deal would be between $400 and $600, and there's no way I'm allowed to go over a grand.

Here's what I need: Linux compatibility in everything that matters (i.e. everything but the modem, the parallel port, and any infra-red devices). I have a strong preference to nipple mice over touchpads. An x86 processor. Very long battery life-- the longer the better. Linux supports means it must suspend and come back without being cranky-- i.e. no shutting down X-windows and then coming back to make it "go" because the video drivers are flaked. Given my bad habits, the thing must be business-class rugged, ready to travel. Given my work habits, I'd like as big a monitor as possible, but I'll live with a 14.1" if necessary.

It would look like the IBM T43 would be ideal, but so far every Thinkpad I've owned has had a hardware, um, idiosyncracy. There were easy work-arounds for the other two, but the T43 series has a reputation for bad fan control, causing "pulsing" and noise. What other laptops in my price range qualify for my rugged needs?

Comments

[zanfur.livejournal.com]

I use a T60, running various flavors of linux. Everything works. Now that the T61 is out, I expect it to drop precipitously in price, to around the top end of your range.

Everything worked out-of-box with Ubuntu feisty and gutsy, although if you have an ATI video card, in gutsy you'll have to decide between the fast video driver (the closed-source one) and the ability to suspend. I chose suspend. I wish I had chosen to get a non-ATI video card.

Oh, the fingerprint reader didn't work out of box. I had to muck with that. But wireless, laptop-mode (longer battery life!), trackpad, full resolution, ethernet, and even the hotbuttons on the laptop (volume up/down, screen brightness up/down, sleep, hibernate, mute, etc.) all worked without any effort on my part.

I haven't found a better laptop for linux.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting on the EEE from ASUS but I suspect it's not really what you're looking for.

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

I use a t30 - 2ghz, triple-booting XP, FC6 and FBSD. Internal wifi. The ONLY problem is that the rt2500 (non-ibm?) wifi card isn't yet in the FC mix: I d/l the source and rebuild/install the driver whenever the kernel updates.

Most of the time it's turn it on and go.

Battery from laptopsforless.com (current 15% coupon is * OCT15* (maybe without the asterisks, but WITH the space, I think...) with a 1yr replacement guarantee.

Happy user and customer.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Do you want a large screen because:
a) You want a physically large display
b) You want a display with many pixels
c) You want a display with large pixels (low DPI)
d) Some other reason?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I want a screen where I can keep both the story (or IDE) and reference material in sight at the same time. A bigger screen with a high DPI is directly related to developer performance, and always has been.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

How well does it do suspend/resume? My last two laptops (TP 600E, TP T23) did suspend (not hibernate) fabulously, to the point where Appleheads were envious at the 'on' time!

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

So, raw pixels then. There are way too many 15" screens out there with 1024x768 pixels, especially on older laptops. That's generally enough for two text documents, especially if one is docs and the other is code, but generally not enough for two webpages.

I've been very happy with the Fujitsu P series line. I've owned a P2040 and P5020D, and known people who have owned pretty much all of the other models except the latest one. Many people I know bought them after seeing mine. They're small, so they don't have a *large* screen, but they do run 144DPI - 1280x768 on a 10.4" screen. Great battery life, good build quality (not great, but good). I bet the older models are cheap now.

http://leog.net/fujp_forum/ is the place to ask, if you want to track down a used one.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Oh, and no problems with Linux, if you run a reasonably modern kernel. When I bought them new, they needed some hacking to support all the hardware, but they don't anymore.

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Never tried it, and I'm not sure how to go about making it suspend. Tell me, and I'll try it out over the weekend.