I'm considering a new laptop, looking for experiences.

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Bill Freeman <ke1g.nh at gmail.com> writes:
>
> My Acer is scaring me.  Sometimes at startup it goes into an infinite
> reboot loop.  The way out seems to be to force power off, flex the
> case and whack it a few times, after which it boots.
> 
> So, I'm considering replacing it.  Last round I insisted on an AMD
> CPU, but I'm currently drawn to an i7 or i5.
> 
> I know that lots of folks swear by the ThinkPads, and I will consider them.
> 
> I'm not really willing to consider Compaq/HP, Gateway, or Apple, and
> I've found Linux on Toshiba to be troublesome in the past.
> 
> Can anyone offer personal experience stories on the Dell Inspirons?
> 
> Any additional suggestions?

I have experience with ZaReason, and recommend them:

    http://www.zareason.com/

I know people who enjoyed their dealings with System76, also:

    http://www.system76.com/


I bought a couple of Thinkpads for my wife and myself, about 5 years ago;
they're still running, though they have accumulated various little breaks
in their case-hardware (I listed some of the issues with mine, a few
months ago, and you can find that in the archive; the broken palm-rests
over the PCMCIA slots in both laptops is one of the most annoying).

I called Lenovo a few months ago when I was considering new laptops;
when I asked about Linux compatibility, they told me that they
didn't sell it preinstalled, that they didn't know anything about
whether it'd even boot on their hardware, and I was on my own;
when I asked them about getting a laptop without a copy of MS Windows
pre-loaded, they said that it wasn't possible for most models, but
they did have a couple of not-particularly-desirable models that were
available with FreeDOS installed, that they couldn't provide me
with any data about Linux compatibility of those models either,
and they couldn't even guarantee that any hardware not supported
by FreeDOS (which included everything interesting, like Wi-Fi
and 3-D graphics) would be in any kind of `known good' state when
it got to me.

When I bought my and my wife's Thinkpads, mine was 1 generation old
and hers was the latest generation; mine was *relatively* straightforward
to get everthing working with Debian, but still needed a day or so of
consulting thinkwiki.org and fiddling. My wife's took almost a month
to get working right. If want to use the latest release of Ubuntu,
I hear that's relatively straightforward to get working on
just about anything because Canonical does a lot of integration work
*with current- and next-generation hardware* (which is presumably
part of the rationale behind their 6-month release-cycle),
but: if it's true, Lenovo wasn't going to tell me that; and I
didn't feel like bearing the risk, at that point--especially
at if I was going to cost me extra to do so. So I got a laptop
from ZaReason, and I'm sufficiently satisfied that I now have no plans
to ever buy from Lenovo until they start answering my questions
differently.

The total package from ZaReason seems superior in most ways, and
about equivalent in other ways. A couple of things that really
stuck out:

    * ZaReason's `open hardware warranty' was the warranty of my dreams
      (it looks like they've recently changed their terms, though;
       it still looks like it's probably pretty good).

    * Since they're whitebox laptops, they're actually designed
      to be modular and serviceable; flipping the laptop over,
      it was immediately obvious how to go about cleaning the fan.
      Cleaning the Thinkpad's fan sucked... less than I would have
      expected..., but it still sucked.

    * The one that I got runs a lot cooler than I would have expected.

The negatives? It has a pretty-but-cheap paintjob on some parts, so
my palm-prints are already worn in. Eh.

Oh, also:

    * Thinkpads appear to be the last refuge of people who like the
      `pointing stick' interface; ZaReason's laptops, like almost
      everyone else's, all use touchpads.

    * Thinkpads have *drainage holes* to help save you if you spill
      your beverage on your laptop. As far as I can tell, nobody else
      does that. This seemed like a huge win when I bought my wife's
      Thinkpad, because she had just destroyed a laptop from work
      my dumping a cup of coffee-with-milk-and-sugar onto it,
      but there have been no spill-incidents of any sort in the
      years since.


> Any bad experiences with the i7 CPU?

I've been using one for several months, but I have no idea what
"bad experiences with the CPU" could even mean--I thought that
the industry basically got beyond `buggy CPUs' 2 decades ago,
so what does this mean?

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."