[LAU] buying a new laptop

Arnold Krille arnold at arnoldarts.de
Wed Aug 31 07:49:42 UTC 2011


On Wednesday 31 August 2011 09:08:54 david wrote:
> Atte André Jensen wrote:
> > Options (I can think of):
> > I saw a secondhand ThinkPad X61s (dual-core 1.6Ghz, 3Gb ram, 12"
> > display) from a well known online shop I trust and used many times
> > (bought my current laptop there). There's 6 months warrenty, and my
> > general impression with ThinkPads is that they have good build quality,
> > it's the only laptop I would consider buying used. It has firewire so...
> I hear very good things about ThinkPads. They seem to be quite durable
> and perform well. You should check to see if its Firewire chipset has
> Linux support, though.

++ on the thinkpads.

There are also Dells sold with linux onboard and the Fujitsu-Siemens of my 
mother also looks stable and runs perfectly with linux.

There are less and less laptops with firewire builtin, you should look for a 
pcmcia/pccard slot on your next laptop and get a firewire-card for that 
(10-20€).

> > Go the netbook route. I'm at a loss here, all these new processors, both
> > the i-series and the atom (N-series), I have no idea how well they
> > perform. I tried a few from friends, and they seem fast enough. Anyone
> > here making music on a netbook? This would most certainly mean I would
> > have to get a usb soundcard, hmmm :-(

There are netbooks that are capable of audio (not a full-fledged 24 track 
ardour session but still). The atoms also did the same transition as desktop-
cpus from single core to single-core-with-hyper-threading to dual-core which 
the newest generations is (or is it not yet released?).

> I've never seen a netbook with Firewire, though, I kind of doubt you're
> going to find any.

People want low energy and long battery-lifetime. And still they want fast 
cpu, large memory, large and fast disks and all the juice from sata, usb(1|2|
3), dvi, hdmi, sd-cards, wifi-n, bluetooth and wwan. Asking for an additional 
firewire is a but to much for the little boards and machines. And it drives up 
production costs for a feature that is not as wide-spread (sadly). Not to 
mention that bus-power for your firewire will drain the battery...

Going for a real notebook instead of a netbook will give you only a bit lower 
battery but a bigger screen and firewire (directly or indirectly).

Have fun,

Arnold
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