Sunday, April 24, 2005

Shopping for a laptop

Want three things critically.

A large display with a pixel count equal or great to the current one (1600x1200)

Acpi sleep to work in linux.

Battery life somewhere north of about 5 hours from the batteries in the box...

Said laptop doesn't appear to exist, but if it did, it appears that it wouldn't have a pci-express ati graphics chipset. it appears that nvidia has spent some time working on at least some acpi support. The one that will probably work best is the intel media accelerator 915 (maybe) at the expense of being really slow (maybe).

In terms of decent sized displays, Dell latitude d810/Precision Worstation m70 (nvidia) look like the best option, maybe the older d800 (agp nvida) or the inspiron 6000 (intel) are in the right range as well. the inspiron 9300 might with with it's top of the line graphics accelerator but not the lesser ones. the latitudes can hold a second battery, but the remainder probably aren't really all that great.

I've recently entertained the notion of a 17" powerbook but it just seems to silly, not enough pixels, one button mouse, no support for the airport extreme (broadcom) wireless in linux, the fact that it's not an x86 etc.

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