[ILUG] Looking for a new laptop.

[Darragh]

Hello all, 

 

I'm currently on the look out for a new laptop.  

The two I'm replacing always worked perfectly with Linux without much tweeking at all!  I'm hoping for the same compatibility with the new one. 

 

The two I had were both HP.  One was the DV8396EA and the other was the TX1020.  

 

I'm seriously looking at the HP 6930P at the moment but the company I usually buy from, Ergo, www.smartbusiness.ie ,  are very slow in getting back to me lately and I'm a firm believer if your pree-sales customer service is slow then your after sales is most likely going to be even worse so although I find them the cheapest reseller of HP stuff in Ireland, I think I'll look around for something else.  

 

 

The reason that I was thinking of the 6930P was:

1.        It's small....ish.

2.       It matches the spec of the DV8396EA so It should continue to meet my requirements for about another two years.  

3.       It will support an extra hard drive connected to the CD/DVD drive bay. I'm currently looking at buying a second 160GB drive. I like having the two as I can do as much messing around with different OS's without worrying about causing problems on the other.  In the rair times that I'm not doing any messing around, the second hard drive is handy for making quick backups of important programs / files.  

4.       It's upgradable to 8GB.  I was going to get it with 6GB of RAM. 

I suppose, I'm looking for it all.  Small size, durable, very powerful, with plenty of storage, a decent array of connectivity options and of course, a decent price tag. 

 

Anyone have any suggestions? 

 

I'm a fan of HP's as I've used HP laptops for five years now and have had absolutely no problems with any of them.  I do a lot of work with Dell's at the moment and I find that either the screen's get a bit loose, the keyboards start to get loose, the hard disks on the 830 for example seem to be a bit dodgy as I've seen three of them out of a stock of about fifty fail in the past three or four months, on some earlier models such as the D600, the wireless network card doesn't seem to be great at keeping connectivity.  

 

That said though, if Dell are offering good value on one I'll certainly keep my options open. 

 

We've about forty Toshiba tablets in work but their not used enough to give me any ideas as to what problems they can experience.  I had a Toshiba Satalite about ten years ago and it was a fantastic machine.  That poor thing got bounced all over the place for about five years and only the screen got a bit messy toward the end.  

 

Oh, a minimum of 2.5 hours battery life is required.  

 

Thanks for any suggestions you can give. 

 

 

 

 

Darragh