Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 16:35:54 -0700 From: Eric De Mund <ead@ixian.com> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ideal laptop recommendations? Message-ID: <16056.18138.287510.281869@idiom.com> In-Reply-To: <87brygq8jm.fsf@fuckup.hack.org>
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Hello, I don't recall the first requester's name, but, hello. I always ask people if they're going to be carrying the machine here and there or are, instead, going to be using it in one place. If the machine is going to be travelling back and forth to work or back and forth to school on a regular basis, I tell them to go down to their local mom-and-pop compu- ter repair place and talk to pop. Or mom. Have them tell you what brands and models you should avoid. And then ask them why. When I did this in 2000, I learned that Dell laptops and, to an even greater degree, Sony laptops were flimsy, flimsy, flimsy. They suffered a lot of internal breakage because the boxes were not solidly construct- ed. The manufacturers skimped on materials and strength, and the results were just what you'd expect: expensive repairs that just weren't possi- ble for the end-user to do himself. On the other end of the spectrum, IBM ThinkPads and Toshiba laptops were, according to pop, built like tanks. I ended up running with his recommendation, and bought a ThinkPad 600 2645-51U off of eBay (pop's used ThinkPads were a bit overpriced, but I buy enough stuff from him that he was ok sharing his advice with me gratis). I've enjoyed it, trouble-free, ever since. Regards, Eric p.s. Don't ask me how reliable or easy to use the trackpoint mouse is; I don't know. I hate it and don't use it. But I'm fair; I dislike touch- pads with equal fervor! I pack an optical mouse in the case, and always use that, instead. -- "Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction--from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." Eric De Mund <ead@ixian.com> | Ixian Systems, Inc. | 53 49 B2 23 AF 6C 20 81 http://www.ixian.com/ead/ | Mountain View, CA | ED DD 4C 81 AA C9 D1 A5
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