Very Small Laptop Recommendations?

ken at flyingtoasters.net ken at flyingtoasters.net
Sun Jul 6 00:14:40 EDT 2003


I haven't kept up on the thread (sorry! -- mail problems), but I have one
small notebook, and a friend of mine just bought another, and I can give
some owner info re: both of them.

1 -- my Sony Vaio.  I have an older Vaio Picturebook; the last
pre-Transmeta one, the PCG-C1XS.  While the processors are newer, with
more RAM and HD, and they now have a Sony (tm) memory stick, the current
ones are pretty similar.  It's got a 10.4" 1024x640 display that's pretty
darn nice, weighs in at a whopping 2.2 lbs including battery, is a dream
to carry around, and seems to -- to my everlasting surprise -- work just
fine with 128 MB of RAM.  I love it, though, after three years, my
battery's life is shot to hell, and replacement batteries run roughly the
cost of a new house.

2) My friend recently bought a notebook I'd seriously considered: one of
the Fujitsu Lifebook systems.  While I didn't help him (and thus don't
have first-hand experience), he's a smart, computer-savvy EE, and I'm
willing to say that if he tried to make something work, and failed, it was
probably not going to work.  The biggest roadblock he bumped into -- by
far -- was the LCD panel.  While my 1024x640 resolution is pretty darn
weird, it was fully supported by XFree86, and was just a matter of finding
the right modelines.  His higher resolution of 1280x768, however, wasn't;
he even found some relevant pages that showed what various people had
tried, and failed, to get working.  The bottom line was that 1024x768 was
the way that most were flying, which is somewhat unsatisfactory.  I also
believe he ran into some problems with various facets of the hardware. 
The reason this notebook is so damn nifty, however, is because, unlike my
Sony, for a mere 3.2 lbs., you get things like integrated ethernet
(802.11b and 100 Mbit wired), AND a DVD/CD-R drive.  Damn.

Regardless, both notebooks are light and small enough to tuck under your
arm and take to a meeting, toss in your backpack as an afterthought, or
what-have-you.  Absolutely fantastic for wandering around and
troubleshooting.

$.02,

-Ken

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>
> On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 11:42:13AM -0400, Jeffry Smith wrote:
>> I haven't tried it yet (since I haven't purchased a GPS system
>> yet), but GPSMAN (http://www.ncc.up.pt/gpsman/wGPSMan.html)
>> lists maps in it's capabilities.  The debian package is at:
>> http://packages.debian.org/testing/misc/gpsman.html
>
> I actually played with this a week or two ago; while it will
> happily display your GPS position on a map, it does not have the
> capability to load maps into the GPS.  I highly doubt that any
> non-garmin-specific software will ever do this, since both the map
> format and the transmission protocol are proprietary.  Since this
> is all going to be handlebar mounted for the trip (not to mention
> the power issues), I *really* don't want to deal with a separate GPS
> reciever and display.
>
> As it happens, I did manage to obtain a laptop small enough to take
> on this trip, so I can just use the Garmin software and avoid the
> cabling and software mess that I would need to connect the GPS to
> the Z.
>
> - --
> mwl+gnhlug at alumni.unh.edu          OpenPGP KeyID 0x57C3430B
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