Laptop recommendations

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Anyone want to give me some laptop recommendations? Here's the ones I've been looking at. My usage of it will be as a portable testing platform for web and database servers as well as things such as snort, SELinux, and general business usages such as having all the documentation I'm working on available when I travel, which I seem to be doing more and more, as well as having a couple of games with which to amuse myself on the plane for a couple of hours.

The OS that comes with these laptops really doesn't matter as I'm going to be installing Debian on it anyway.

HP Pavilion dv8000z

Asus A6V

The main musts for me are a >=15.4" screen, 1 gig ram, and 80 gig hard drive. The ability to run Linux, and dedicated video memory are also requirements.

 

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i find hp laptops always very good, sturdy and reliable, both for generic home use as well as, and may especially, for business use. i'm typing this on an hp laptop as a matter of fact. but, when you want to step out of the box, for instance by trying to upgrade hardware components, changing the operating system, etc., i find hp not very flexible. never worked with asus. i hate dell. never had much problems with linux on toshiba laptops. i do most of my, uhm, questionable stuff, with debian on a toshiba laptop, as it gives me the least greavance with drivers and performance.

 

I agree with d-faktor, HP laptops have a good reputation, and since I used to repair them, I know they are reliable.

I'm using a Toshiba now and haven't had any issues at all with it. I 'think' that extending the warranty on a tosh is cheaper than HP aswell.

 

have to echo simon's hp repair guide.. HP's are reliable and easier to update/repair! Umm have you looked at fujitsu siemens laptops?

 

I purchased a Toshiba Tecra for a friend of mine and really like it. He's had it for more than a year now with absolutely no problems.

The reason I didn't include Toshiba in the list of possibilities I've looked at so far is that they have changed all but their most expensive laptops so that they all run shared video memory rather than having dedicated ram on the card. In so doing they effectively priced themselves out of the running.

As to the HP and Linux I've done a fair amount of research into running Linux on it. ATI now has some proprietary video drivers that can be installed for the card in the dv8000z.

 

I have been using an HP laptop for the past six years and in that time it has had two major faults. First the system board decided to go belly up and then the inverter for the screen back-light bit the dust. Although it was covered under extended warranty I had the worst experience ever trying to get HP to agree to fix the damn thing. The people on their outsourced help desk were of little or no help at all. I spent around four hours insisting that they should fix it and in the end they did but what a palaver. I will never buy HP stuff again.

 

Here ya go Freddy. It's a bit old and a bit heavy, but it's one of the best machines I've ever had:



That's right.....I bought it for 1 dollar.

 

At my old work place, we had had Dells. Every now and again we would get the latest model, and I must admit I loved them. There were never any problems with them, and they just seemed very sturdy.

The Laptop I have at home is a Packard Bell . . . and I have to admit I wouldn't touch them with a s***y stick from here on in. Out of the box, it was nothing but trouble. First, the sound goes unless you have ti on an absolutely flat surface,it also goes if you use it for more than 40 minutes, then the battery stops working, and the DVD reader / CD writer starts refusing to recognise DVD's. All this in 24 months.

My personal Faves are Dell and Toshiba. Toshiba are my faveeeeeeeeeee by far.

 

I have had a few laptops recently... before selling them all and waiting for a bit more cash to get an Intel Mac...

The few bits of advice I have to offer are simple..

Firstly... check the HDD's RPM speed... I had a laptop with a 80GB drive which was ace, until I realized it ran at 4200RPM and it really became a bottleneck... a 5400 or even a 7200 would be awesome...!!

Secondly...check how the RAM is allocated... if it is 1GB of RAM, is it 2 x 512's or 1 1024 stick... this is important especially if you want to upgrade it later on... as if you have a pair in, you are going to have to make one or both redundant dependent upon if the board needs a matched pair.. (Also check speed!)

Thirdly... if you intend on running Linux, I would strongly suggest something with nVidia inside... purely because from what I hear (And as I am sure you are aware with your Linux knowledge!), nVidia have excellent drivers for Linux which are already on most distributions and source is available from nVidia...

Although saying that Fedora Core 4 + ubuntu had drivers for a Mobility Radeon 9700... which impressed me!

If I were going to buy from one particular brand, it would have to be Acer... just on personal experience I find:

Dell's - Too many annoying faults (Hardware disappearing from detection, batteries failing)
Sony - Just too expensive for the specification
HP - I have no experience of, but a friend has had big issues with them and a failed power supply
Toshiba - Nice laptops with some excellent high resolution screens
Fujitsu-Siemens - Very sturdily built, well priced, can be bargains in some models...

And thats my 2p's worth

 

Here ya go Freddy, This should work great for ya..

It may be a little on the heavy side though ;)

 

A little post office near me actually has and uses something very similar to that to run their little paper round operation!!

 

Got mine 18 months ago & when I looked in to it the main recommendations were HP, Toshiba & Dell.

Sony were to be avoided due to poor aftersales - don't know if they've improved though.

 

Well, I'm typing this from my new laptop.

I bought the HP dv8000z. It's pretty well-configured. It has 128 megs of dedicated video ram, 2 80 gig sata drives, a 17" screen, 1 gig of ram, and a 2.0 ghz AMD Turion. The screen is really bright, and resolution is 1440x900. The best part of it was I paid $200 less than what I would have had to pay onn HP's site for it.

I'm now going to start installing Debian. See you all later.

 

Sounds very impressive Freddy, let us know how you get on with the install. I am all ears

 

Well, either Debian's amd64 release isn't ready for prime time or it isn't compatible with this laptop. I installed it first and everything from the mirrors to the OS was dog-slow.

I installed the 32 bit version of Debian with just a 64 bit kernel and this thing is a screamer.... Everything works from the start except for the modem, and that I don't care about as I'll never use it.

I downloaded and installed the 32 bit version in less than 30 minutes. That's a default desktop install with both Gnome and KDE.

 

Great but come on Freddy, you've already told us how much fun it is getting a modem to work in Debian and you might want to send a fax one day

 

LOL. If I do spend the time in an attempt to get it going, it won't be for a while. That modem is at the very tail end of my list of priorities. Funny how work rearranges priorities and shortens the amount of time a person has to play with such things.