Requirements for a New Laptop
About a year ago, I articulated my upgrade cycle for laptops. Then, last summer, most of that criteria was met and I rushed to order a new one. However, when Dell reported delays of up to 2 months to ship that particular laptop, I reconsidered my impulsiveness and cancelled.
I've since gone 8 full months with the laptop setup I already had: the Dell 700m running Ubuntu, the Mac Powerbook G4 and a client-owned laptop for project work. The fact that the extra time went by just fine points to a change that's necessary in my cycle. I really do need to move to a 3 year laptop replacement cycle instead of the shorter 18-24 months that I've been thinking.
Regardless, that actually puts right now as either right on time on the new schedule or overdue on the old, so I'm looking to buy a laptop before we leave for Ireland in July. I'm trying to make sure I haven't missed any hidden gems out there, so here's a quick rundown of the specs I'm looking for right now.
- Ideally in the $1500 ballpark, but up to $2000.
- 13" or 14" screen.
- 4GB of RAM
- 7200 RPM hard drive, preferably the 200GB that's out.
- Real video card
- DVD burner
- Intel Core2 Duo T7000 or better
- Bluetooth
- Webcam
- Extended battery. The longer the life the better.
- Wireless N if possible
- Pre-installed OS doesn't matter as Ubuntu will be installed
Beyond that list, the overall plan for the machine is that it will run Ubuntu64 (falling back to 32 if I just can't get along with 64). Layered on that will be VMWare Workstation, to hopefully take advantage of the new Unity features for Linux/Windows. Windows Vista Ultimate (and my Visual Studio dev environment) will then be in a VM (hence the large fast hard drive) and I can get to individual applications and windows on the Ubuntu desktop.
So, who's selling such a beast at the moment?
Oh, and for the record, I am also considering a parallel track wherein the base hardware is, indeed, a MacBook with VMWare hosting Ubuntu and Windows, but am not 100% convinced.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:24 am
FWIW, I've been running Ubuntu64 on my desktop for about a year and a half. There are a few vexations (like needing nspluginwrapper for Flash), but overall the distro has matured well. In the beginning, I was seeing some instability in the nVidia drivers that seemed to cause occasional hard shutdowns, but that's only happened 2 or 3 times in the last few months. Wine is now solid enough to run Steam (though running a game in full-screen tends to leave the desktop in a weird state on exit). VMWare Server (I like free:) ) runs the clone of my old Windows XP machine fine. I did dump beryl a while back. Spinning the cube is fun for a while, but some apps were unstable so I went back to Kwin.
April 5th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Yeah, I'd heard that with the 7.x and 8.x versions, Ubuntu64 was really stabilizing well. With a few wrappers for 32 bit legacy stuff, it works well.
Given that one of the points of this upgrade was to go from 2GB of maximum RAM to 4GB and to actually install that 4GB, the move to 64 bit is the logical OS choice to actually get to use that last GB of RAM.
Cool to know that Steam works on Wine, but not surprising on the desktop state. Stuff that messes with 3D display does that more often than it should.
I also like VMWare GSX server and use it on pretty much all of my machines right now. I'm looking at Workstation in large part because with the "Unity" feature, you can actually have individual applications/windows display on the host desktop without having to display the entire desktop, which is something I would like at this point.
The Beryl stuff really feels much more like frosting than actual food. It looks great in a demo and is fun to play with for a while, but isn't something I ever really stick with long-term.
I like a much simpler desktop experience than wobbly windows and genie effects. Many of the effects also take much longer than the other way.
I *do* like the Expose effect for getting a quick look at everything that's running, so I'm more likely to just strip out most of the stuff that's superfluous and keep the few bits I do like.