[plug] Which brand of laptop?

[Daniel Pittman]

Lucas van Staden <lvs at dedmeet.com> writes:

> I expect you will get a lot of 'personal choice' replies here.
>
> My personal choice is IBM thinkpads (now called Lenovo) (although it
> does not meet the keypad option - I personally find laptops with that
> tend to be too big in size) . I use a T43.

Likewise, with a T61p 1920x1200.  Very nice hardware, less nice
graphics.  Given knowledge of the future I would have preferred the
soon-to-be-released W500, which is more or less the same, but with ATI
dedicated graphics hardware in place of NVIDIA.

> Main reasons:
>
> 1. Linux is well supported, officially by lenovo.

Only officially on some models, which you have to purchase specifically
and only support a limited range of distributions, but the hardware and
firmware are uniformly high quality, so this is seldom a problem in
practice.

[...]

> 3. Large community of linux users: http://www.thinkwiki.org and
>    http://forum.thinkpads.com/

These are great resources.

Some specific advice from my experience running Thinkpad hardware for
years: The *6* series seem to have less troublesome hardware than the
*4* series.

The new W series seem to be a bit improved, also, so you may want to
wait for them to come out -- if for nothing else but to drive down the
price of the *6* series hardware.

It is worth purchasing the extended hardware warranty; while the
Thinkpad hardware is uniformly more robust than other vendors, in my
experience, it is actually worth owning the warranty.

Regards,
        Daniel