Plan to Buy a New Laptop

It is time for me to buy a new laptop computer and i was searching the net for the last few days looking for one. The results haven't really been satisfying and i thought you might have information i lack - if so, i'd be grateful for sharing it with me and the probably interested audience.

What i want:
My laptop is strictly only for home use. For every purpose mobile i have a 10" netbook. For home (-office) i want a system which is not bound to a specific place like a desktop, but can be moved around to the couch or another room. That's as mobile as it ever will get, therefore battery operating time or weight are non-issues, as long as the battery allows me to get from one power outlet to the next.

I want the display to be big (17" or up) and i want the best possible. I learned the painful way with my last system that what is good for watching videos is not necessarily good for working: glaring displays are ... *yuck*.

I plan on running several virtual machines for all sorts of test purposes so i need a lot of RAM. I want to have 8GB minimum, 16 GB would be great. On the other hand i never experienced shortage on processing power with the system i had (HP Pavilion dv7, AMD Turion), so i suppose every processor sold today will do.

I plan - needless to say - to run Linux on it, so i need a system compatible with Linux on one hand and i would really appreciate avoiding the "Microsoft Tax": many laptops are not only sold only with Windows but also all sorts of "useful" software packages like MS-Office, Norton-Anti-Virus and what have you. Call me greedy but i don't want to pay a company i despise for a product i won't ever use.

For the same reason (Linux) i don't want a Blueray-drive to be installed but a DVD drive instead. AACS forbids the development of drivers and that in turn forbids the usage of Blueray for me.

I would like to have an SSD installed instead of a HDD. Not because i really need it but because it is new, fast and cool (yes, I'm childish sometimes). It doesn't have to be all that big: right now i use ~25GB of my harddisk and that includes 15GB for disk images of virtual machines. 128GB will be more than i probably ever will use.

Price is not really an issue - i even considered (briefly) buying a MacBook Pro, which would come at ~3.5k$ in the configuration i would like. On the other hand I'd like to use the machine for a longer time so quality of the finish and general workmanship is indeed to be considered.

Finally a detail: the HP Pavilion dv7 i use right now has its (big) power cable attached on the right side (where it goes straight out). This is utter foolish, because it will get in the way of the mouse for all right-handed people (including me), which are the overwhelming majority.

Any input is welcome.

bakunin

What about lenovo ThinkPad.

I love that laptop because the website says it is build for performance and not for fancy look.

And it is sleek and elegant for those who love performance. But I don't think it is available without Windows.

I have considered them and tried to configure a system for me at their website. Unfortunately they have no 17" models, 15.6" is the maximum they offer. They also do not offer SSDs, not a single system with 16GB RAM and you're forced to buy Windows and M$ Office along with the hardware. That was a little too much compromise for my liking.

bakunin

Even I have a plan to buy one for. What is your suggestion, I don't want any flashy and fancy laptop.
I am looking for a laptop which best suits for playing around.

I also wan the keyboard joy stick. I am so used to it. What do you suggest for me.

I recently bought a MacBook Air, 15 inch 13 inch, and I think it is an amazing machine, so light and boots so fast. Highly recommended.

To be honest a MacBook is shortlisted already. A friend has one and i could do a closer inspection. What i like is the workmanship and the finish, both of which are outstanding. I also like the idea of having a native real Unix to work with.

On the other hand the GUI is outright creepy (i don't like a-friendly-little-thingy-here-and-there-style GUIs, i like them to be like a vi session: terse and unforgiving. I use an X-server with mwm (Motif Window Manager) on top, no GNOME, no KDE, no nothing. Usually my desktop consists of a few Firefox-windows and a some xterms. I don't know if i will be able to deinstall/disable all the graphic mumbo-jumbo and all the well-meaning assistants which make my life miserable by interpreting instead of doing what i say.

Another concern is with the Mac is virtualization: under Linux i have kvm, OpenVZ, VirtualBox, VMWare and what have you. Is there at least one or two virtualization packages available under the FreeBSD(NetBSD?), which is the basis for MacOS?

All this doesn't rule out the Mac, i simply haven't researched enough to come to a conclusion about it.

bakunin

Hahaha... you don't have to use the GUI on a MacBook Air if you don't want to. There is an underlying UNIX operating system and a command line if you wish to use it, all the time.

Or, you could just wipe the entire MacUNIX OS and install any Linux/UNIX that runs on Intel architecture; but I would not do it personally, as I think it is great to have a very nice GUI and a command line window.

If you want virtualization on your MBA, just wipe it and install Linux, or dual boot. You are not a "prisoner" on Intel architecture....

After owning a MBA for over a month now, I think it is the finest laptop on the planet.

Having owned a MacBook Pro for a couple of months now, I'd say it's not far behind.

The design and build quality is incredible, and is easily the most robust-feeling laptop I've ever used or seen. It also comes in a 17" model. SSD is an option, albeit an expensive one.

I certainly wouldn't buy a Mac to wipe it for Linux, when you could get other laptops for half the price, or less (if nowhere near as nice looking and robust).

For virtualisation I use VMware Fusion. It has a great feature called "Unity", anomg others (best read about it from their website).

And of course OS X is Unix-based. One key-press and you're in a shell.

Can't beat that

We don't deal with Lenovo at work anymore after two big incidents with them.

1) One of our customers had a Lenovo computer we sold them suddenly die. Flat-out dead, a motherboard problem. The Lenovo support technician actually came out to fix it, announced he had brought all the wrong parts, left, and waited for the warranty to expire before telling them he wasn't bothering to come back. We ended up replacing that computer out of our own pocket.

2) Lenovo once shipped us a laptop formatted with the wrong operating system, Windows 7 Ultimate. The license key stuck to it therefore didn't work. (Came with the wrong restore disk, too.) They refused to correct or even acknowledge their error, we had to reformat with our own Windows 7 disks and buy an extra license key.

most engineers will say toshiba for "hardiness" and long lasting battery. I like toshiba or fujitsu machines but they can get quite expensive.

You have to rely on a local hardware shop that is stunting with OS-less laptops to find a good deal. This is a very rare occurrence these days, even Linux-only laptops are unheard of for a year or two. For the office we purchased a laptop that had no OS, but that was back in the days when 4GB RAM was still the norm.

I bought my Inspiron 1525n from Dell with Ubuntu installed a few years ago. (I promptly wiped Ubuntu and installed Fedora.) Dell rolled out their Linux line with much fanfare years ago, but I think they aren't getting the sales they hoped. It's hard to find a Linux PC on the Dell website by accident.

Very well said! Regardless of weather you are talking about Mac, Windows or even some too-helpful desktop managers for Linux, I too want the PC to do what I say.

The VirtualBox Downloads page has a link for OS X hosts. I think I've heard of others.

But the real question is whether you can run OS X in a virtual machine under Linux on generic hardware. Apple's official policy seems to be NO! Don't even think about it or we'll slap your butt in jail so fast your head will spin! But there are various results from googling that suggest it can be done. If I ever get around to it, that's what I want to do.

Sounds like you are describing the HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation. I have the 8540w (15.6 inch version) for work. It's okay, I suppose. Can't say I love it.

Thanks! This was an extremely helpful advice! Googling around i found a shop in my vicinity (in german), which sells configurable notebooks, even without OS. Exactly what i wanted.

I configured a 8740w with 16GB RAM, a 128GB SDD and a WUXGA display for ~2600 EUR for me - a lot less than the MacBook Pro (but arguably not as good-looking). I think this one will be the winner.

I will keep you informed about my experience with it if anybody is interested.

bakunin

Without OS: good to know that these are still for sale, although intermittently and usually only in specialised outfits.

Just wanted to tell you that today my all new woderful notebook arrived (thanks again, Ygor - great tip!). I had to make some small adjustments and probably you are interested in my experiences, so here we go:

The original plan was to buy a I5 system, because i have no performance problems at all. Shortly after placing the order the dealer called to tell me that with a 2-core processor the system only knows about 8GB RAM. Well, he gave a special price for the upgrade and i can't bring myself to be disappointed about having more processing power now than perhaps i ever will need (i wonder when i ever will grow up and buy only what i need, not what is cool, hip and fast - *sigh*).

Anyway, this was my final system, which came for a price of EUR 3113,-, including VAT:

HP Elitebook Mobile Workstation 8740W
non-glare WUXGA display 1920x1200
Intel I7-740QM
16GB DDR-3 RAM PC10600 CL9
ATI Fire graphics, 1GB local memory
256GB Crucial C300 SSD

My first impression was very good: it looks very solid, is less noisy than my old notebook (a HP Pavilion dv7) and compared to the closed-shop BIOS of its predecessor the BIOS is filled with options.

The old one had a "BIOS tuning program" or something such instead - which ran exclusively under Windoze, naturally. Thank you for nothing! I don't want to install a complete OS every time i want to change the boot order.

Anyway, the new thing looks a lot more professional - built for work, not for watching videos while archiving last holidays photos.

I put in an old Ubuntu 9.04 CD i happen to find in my - well, you really don't want to see my software archive, LOL - and try to start up. The displays resolution and quality is breathtaking and i had to take some time just to look at this absolutely phantastic screen. I'm really looking forward to work with this baby.

The downside is that no network is working: there is no WLAN device, suggesting that i have to find the right driver module, but even eth0 is missing and i can't configure a cable-bound network. The output of "ifconfig" only shows 2 devices, "lo0" and "pan0", i don't know what to make of that.

Well, let's see what an up-to-date Fedora version (15) can do with the hardware, so i am downloading the installation DVD right now (3.3GB - that takes a while). I will tell you tomorrow what happened.

bakunin

3113 Euros? That's $4386. Holy Cow!

Don't let the airport goons drop it. They'll just say, "Oh, sorry. Move along."

$4,437 USD by my currency converter app!

Wow! I thought I paid a lot for my fully upgraded MacBook Air, which was around $2,000 USD including Singapore GST (Tax), which I thought was too much, LOL.

EDIT: On the other hand, I still can't get my MBA to recognize my Galaxy S running Android 2.2 as a USB mass storage device (MSD) despite trying every solution Google searches can offer. Beware Android users! Apple does not play well with Androids!

It is a sad story that for electronic gadgets 1$=1EUR if not even worse. Try shopping for a MacBook Air with 4GB RAM, the faster 2.13GHz processor and the "Apple Super Drive" (whatever this is). At the US store (Apple) it is priced $ 1878,-, the same system at the german store (Apple) is EUR 1868,-. For HP and all the other big players it is pretty much the same picture.

Still, i didn't want to order in the US because customs can be a bit tricky and if something goes wrong claiming warranty overseas is some work.

My smartphone currency converter app is "near real time" and pulls down bank rates on demand.

At this moment, it shows 1 Euro equals 1.4239 USD.

... so I think in the days of Internet connectivity by smartphones, most have accurate currency conversion apps.

Now, I checked the rate is: 1 Euro = 1.41400 U.S. dollars, market has changed since I started writing this post, or I forgot to force update since yesterday when I was working cross-currency on something.