Well now it`s time to look around till my birthday,I got few months to go and I`m asking your gentlemen which laptop is the best for any Linux OS with all the bell`s like one comes with DvD driver....

Thanx for helping me

Mandriva-user

EDIT: I've pinned this topic as the official place to discuss Linux laptops. If you are looking for a Linux laptop, please post you requirements here. And checkout this post first. Any "which laptop should I buy thread" posted seperately will be merged here. -SoulSe (Forum Moderator)

It all depends on your budget

You can have Acers starting of 800€ and it can go up 'till 4000 - 5000€ for some Ibm's or Alienware machines.

If you look at the 2 lappy's in my sig, the Ferrari Acer cost me +/- 2800€ and the Travelmate 1300€.

Most lappy's will come with a DVD burner but watch out for the following things:

1. You want battery life then go with Centrino or A64, stay away from P4
2. You want a nice screen, then don't get anything below XVGA (1400x1050), and remember, the bigger the screen (17") the less battery you'll have.
3. Watch out for the hard drive, you have 3 options, 4200RPM, 5400RPM and 7200RPM, I have the latest and I must say that today I would prefer the bigger disk of my wife's laptop although it's 5400RPM which I don't even notice. So don't go for the fastest, you won't notice, ofc if you ain't a benchmark freak
4. Look at the weight, I just installed a Toshiba Quosimo for a friend and man, that thing is HEAVY, I wouldn't like to carry it around.
5. Maybe try to get one with the Nvidia Geforce 6600 GO instead of the ATI cards, they seem to be better altough I'm very happy with both my ATI cards.

http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=25923 - to find a reseller with either Linux Laptops or no-OS laptops.

And I am pinning this topic and renaming it to avoid us having this discussion for a millionth time.

What about AMD64 3200 to 3600+ if is out there,not pentium what ever so.
So what you think about battery life on AMD64 3200 to 3600+.
Of course I`m looking smaller screen 14-15" screen in the future I have 19-21 HDTV for my laptop computer.

I have an AMD 3500+ with 15.4 inch screen, 80GB HD, 1GB Ram and I am getting around 2 - 2.5 hours for battery life. This is with a 6 cell battery. If you want more time, go for the 12 cell battery.

I just browse to http://www.newegg.com and saw an Acer Turion 64 (basically mobile Athlon 64 with lower speed grade) for under US$1000. I will be surprised if it is not Linux compatible since Acer releases several laptop models with Linux preinstalled in Indonesia.

Dammit, this laptop makes me miss the US more and more.

Here is the link
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16834115303

Well which one is the question acer or asus

my sis bought an acer travelmate laptop, installed Mandriva 10.2 on it and she says it works flawlessly

If you want (almost) complete Linux compatibility, go with Acer.
And no, I am not biased since my uncle is an Acer distributor in Indonesia

to throw my two cents in....

my wife has a dell inspiron with a p4. we both do math and so the heavy computation makes the p4 with the ht wonderful. it has 1 GB of ram and the XVGA screen which is sharp and clear. but the battery life sucks almost immediately. the dell warranty is for a 4-hr battery life....right. this is her second battery and it's barely getting more than 2 hours.

hers has an nvidia gefroce fx5200 card i believe. wonderful card, graphics are beautiful. older mandrake versions weren't happy installing a generic driver for this card. so we had to the do the vesa driver and go from there to get the nvidia driver.

it gets ridiculously hot. i've actually broken a sweat sitting with the vent facing me. further it's heavy. with power supply weight tops 10 pounds. that doesn't sound like much until you've got alot of other stuff with you.

while the dell is a wonderful machine, unless you go for one of the smaller ones, i'm not sure i'd recommend it.

i've got a buddy with one of the centrinos. he's impressed and so am i. it runs fast and seems to do everything he needs it to do plus some. he's in math too so the processor strain is hard for him too.

Well I gona get Acer® Aspire™ 5020,can I upgrade cpu,ram.....?

I've an ASUS 2K Athlon64 3200 Ati9700 (Z81 in US I think) works pretty well managed to get everything working except suspend in 2005LE 32b. While in 64bit 2005LE managed to get every thing working accept suspend and 3d Accel. Nice and fast and well built. I get 2.5-3h Battery with the standard 6cell.

Laptops have traditionally, and still carry on that
tradition, have an extremely high problem rate.
Consumer Reports has indicated that regardless of
brand they saw a 20%+ failure rate new and right out
of the box among laptops. Another consumer reporting
agency indicated that all, 100%, of laptops will
require service in its expected 3 year life. If you
own one, or are anticipating owning one, the extended
warranties are highly recommended.

Aside from the high failure rates laptop manufactures
take great liberties on what's inside the can. The
fact that a laptop is branded Gateway or Dell or
whatever they are not the manufacturer. The real
manufacture is any number of nameless Far East
manufacturers contracted to produce this or that
laptop with this or that feature(s).

Recently Gateway enjoyed a plague of CD/DVD drive
failures. A fellow employee was the victim of
this plague. Although the Gateway laptop had
the same name and model the original manufacturer
decided to change drive supplier mid stream picking
one that proved to exhibit a near 100% failure rate.

Apple Computer is presently experiencing a 20% plus
hard drive failure rate in it's laptop computers.
I was told by one unfortunate owner of one of these
machines that replacement drives are backed up
for months.

1st Rule. Don't buy a laptop and expect to
get a reliable computer.

2nd Rule. If you insist on buying one of these
things purchase the extended warranty.

3rd Rule. Do not count on your laptop to be
your primary computer. It's a portable device
and not to be counted on when needed.

4th Rule. Don't expect a laptop from Brand Name
XYX, Model Number MD-234A, Serial Number 123943
to be the same internally as laptop Brand Name
XYZ, Model Number MD-234A, Serial Number 123944
to be identical internally with its siblings.

So, bottom line, suggestions on this or that
Laptops is likely to be based on experience
with a single machine with little or no knowledge
of the entire deployed base.

While you make some true (although obvious to most of us) points in your post, your statements surrounding reliability stopped being true in the late 90s. I had a laptop that ran Mandrake 9.2 and was not only my main machine, but my only machine for over a year. Not only was it super stable, but everything worked too. This was three years ago now.

My iBook, while not running Linux, has also become more than just my main machine, but the centre of my very existence (iPhoto for my kid, iTunes for my music and livelihood, Neooffice for productivity, etc.). Laptops are not the future, they're the now. More and more people are ditching desktop machines in favour of a portable solution.

And Linux has become only slightly more difficult to configure (and with some distros not at all).

Your post would've held some truth ten years ago, but certainly not now.

Actually, while the 20% rating is a bit too high, I actually somewhat agree with what wilcal said. Some laptops (like IBMs) are built like a brick so failure rates is less than 5%. Other brands seems to have 50% failure rates (in my experience it is usually Toshibas). It seems that every laptop is built in China with unreliable Chinese components, so only the brands that actually have high specifications have better than average failure rates.

Also remember that laptops, by nature, are portable. But the components inside may not be as strong to be carried around. I have my filll of seeing things like bad LCDs, non-working ports, broken HDs, broken CD-RWs, broken keyboards, batteries that doesn't hold their charge, etc, etc. My rule of thumb is that a laptop bought after year 2000 will last probably 3 years at most, while a laptop bought before year 2000 can last for 5 or even more.

Bah. I guess I'm just spoilt with my iBook.

I would not disagree that there is an occasional laptop
out there that is reliable. But that is the exception
not the rule.

OMG that is truly a condemning comment. You are
implying that newer technology is worse then older.
Mercedes has seen this as they packed more and more
bells and whistles into their autos reliability fell
off.

It's not the technology, it's the quality of the components.

Back before the year 2000, I find that computers are built like bricks. Unless there is some catastrophic disasters like lightning strikes or the like, they usually can take a lot of punishment. My office is filled with older "junks" such as Pentium 2s and 3s. Heck, I still have a Compaq Presario P-166 MMX desktop that has built in LCD screen and 6 disk changer. Usually it's the physical/mechanical components that break down first such as fan or hard drive. This is especially true in laptops since most of the laptops I see my co-workers uses are still P2 and P3s Toshibas that are really really well built. One old laptop is I see that is still working is an old IBM Thinkpad, it's over 8 years old, the casing is ugly as sin (so beat up you want to shoot it dead ), the hard drive is having problems and the CD-ROM is not working anymore, yet it still runs windows 98 SE no problem whatsoever.

Now fast forward to the year after 2000. This is the date where computers got "cheap". In order to be cheap and still be profitable, something must be cut down somewhere. Usually they use Chinese components who are barely passed the QC test. I have two Fujitsu laptops whose built in sound cards failed within the first year (since sound cards and modem is usually the same component, that means that those computers cannot use dialup). The toshiba laptop I am using now have a non-working Ethernet port (within the first couple of months), and after a little bit over a year, the DVD-RW cannot even read DVDs anymore. An Acer laptop that is just a bit over a year old have broken LCD. My old Epox NF2 motherboard died of 11 (count it) busted capacitors. And so on, and so on.

No, the technology is actually good, but the component quality went down hill in the quest for profitability while selling them cheap. Why do you think the standard HD warranty is now only 1 year compared to 3 years a few years back?

/me gives his pentium 2 server a kick.

not a single replaced component in that thing original hard drive and all.

my acer laptop is, imho, faring pretty well, it's been used heavily for a year and a half now, and still is operating without problems, havnt had to take it in for any repairs. Only problem is some physical wear incurred from use.

I read that INTEL will take AMD over next year so what can you tell me about it?

Mandriva-user

This is a discussion for a seperate thread. Please start one or PM me and I'll split your post off.

I suppose its IBM

i'm all in on the stuff is getting cheaper part.

we've got a 1996 ibm thinkpad 600 that is tough as nails. i don't know that a single thing is wrong with it. it even looks nice. the only bad thing about it is that it's 9-year old battery has zero-life left in it. my wife's 2004 laptop already has had power-supply issues and the graphics card has intermittent blackouts (no kidding! that dell doesn't know how to fix and didn't have the tech-support to fix it).

we also have two friends who own toshibas and experience PAIN from them. they take their laptops to another friend who does this work. he says NEVER buy a toshiba laptop. they do more ordering of replacement parts from them than anyone else.

Can you tell me is there a laptop any brand that can upgrade CPU

There should be a few that can have their cpu upgraded. Dell, for example, will roll out a series with a variety of CPUs, but using the same MoBo, so upgrading the CPU on most of them would be possible.

The problem with updgrading any hardware on a laptop is not whether the laptop will support it, but how many screws you'll have to remove to get the job done

I have a man in computer store that he charge 20 canadian dollar for flate rate,all other store chrge you hourly rate.So I don`t care how many screw he have to unscrew he get paid for.
Is there only DELL what about ACER,Asus or should I ask them for the answer?

Alright know I`ll thank you very much for litle help and I fund the answer one of the big notebook COMPANY

What I said should relate to any manufacturer, I was just using Dell as an example. I would start by contacting the manufacturer of the laptop and ask them if it can be upgraded and also get them to do it, especially if you are still under warranty. Third part fiddling might void it.

Yes that what I did on 10.nov.2005 I phoned on manufacturer and talk to them,he told me it is possible to upgrade cpu and I will phone others to tnx every onefor your help.

Ciao mikecanada

Ok,ok right now I`m looking for a Compaq Presario R4000 notebook PC what you thing about that?.

What a generalization If you look at the inside of most of the laptops today you will notice the small component size, IF they do not add enough packing around these item to stop the chassis from bending and twisting. Even from environmental bending(Heating and cooling)

Go with a company that provides lots of R&D to the laptop and not flashy boxes.. And large warantee. (Screen mainly)

It is not the componets that fail it is that the components are placed in an environment they should not be in.. (Called cost savings and lack to testing..)

The type of laptop that you get really depends on the company that you buy from. There are relatively few companies that make super solid laptops, while now a days there are a lot of companies that make laptops just to make a profit. For example, while IBM's laptops aren't great in the hardware side of things (their workstation uses an aging FireGL T2), they are built to last.

I'll tell you one thing: DON'T GET AN HP NOTEBOOK if you want Linux compatibility. The school I attend gave us HP Compaq nw8240 Mobile Workstation, and using Windows on it was perfect. However, Ubuntu wasn't compatible with the display, Fedora had its own problems, Solaris wouldn't install, and it took a couple of days to get Mandriva working right. Not only that, the material used is pretty cheap (mostly polished plastic).

I speak from experience: I owned a Thinkpad 600 two years back. The actual notebook was from 1997 or 1998, and until I sold it in 2003 that laptop looked absolutely perfect. Everything was functional, and I had to worry about nothing. Compare that to MANY laptops in my school (same as mine) failing within the FIRST THREE MONTHS of operation. Now that's fresh.

Why not support companies that support linux, this is when Linuxcertified have came from and they just downgrade their premium prices to regular. And they are totally supported.

I agree with you completely! Supporting Linux friendly hardware vendors is a way to get more vendors to improve Linux support. I also suggest contacting hardware vendors who don't support Linux and tell them why you have not purchased their product.

To the point, my top two choices for a Linux friendly laptop is number one, the ThinkPad line of computers. I have not tried any produced by Lenovo, but the two that I used that were produced by IBM (R31 and R40) were very Linux friendly. My second choice is the HP nx6110 laptop. Its marketed as a corporate rather than a comsumer laptop, but is supports Linux very well. The Broadcom based wireless card works very well with ndiswrapper and it supports WPA encryption. Mandriva is a particularly good choice for this laptop since it supports multiple networking profiles at boot up. If you don't want to roll your own with this laptop, you can order one from Spidertools.com. Its a small company that publishes books on many Linux topics and offers a small selection of laptops with Linux pre-installed. That's how I got my current laptop. I'm writing this while connected to my wireless network at home. Just my two cents worth.

Joe

LinuxCertified.com EmperorLinux.com and http://www.linspirenetwork.com/Store are just some other Linux specialist store where they actually take care that everything work and is optimized for Linux use.

I would also just like to throw in that the new Intel Duo chips are both extremely powerful and require little energy. While I love AMD, I find it hard to purchase an AMD at this point because they don't offer an all in one package like Intel does with the Centrino. While I can't state how well the new Intel notebooks will work with any sort of linux flavor, I will recommend waiting for the new Centrino Duo laptops to start rolling off the shelves.

Hi

I am looking for a laptop that will run Linux and have £1000 ($1852) available. I have been doing some research and have found a site called http://www.emperorlinux.com that offers laptops pre-installed with a number of distributions. They offer Dell, IBM (Lenovo), Sony, Panasonic and Sharp machines. They are an American company and being in the UK this isn't particularly useful to me, but the list of laptops they offer is. This means I could buy one of the models from a UK source and install one of the distros they would install such as Mandriva 2006. For example they offer a Dell D820 or Latitude X1 which I could buy for £1099 and an IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad T43 for £1097 (PC Magazine Editors' Choice).

I haven't bought anything yet but the information is very useful.

Regards,
tgk

I would go with IBM (Lenovo) - the Thinkad range are robust, have good battery life and look better than any other PC laptop. Me, I'll stick with my Mac though

I hate being the political guy here, but lenovo latest announcement that they wont support linux and also announce a multi-milion dollar with Microsoft so who knows what went on that deal.

Another report said that one guy claimed this, but that they were continuing with their Linux support.

Typical media stories, never know who to believe

For me, never had any problems so far with my Toshiba laptop, had it almost 4 years now, nothing failed as of yet. The odd pixel missing on the screen, but normally expected with LCD. My wife's Acer is OK too, albeit a Celeron M processor.

If you buy a Lenovo, you should only buy one of the Thinkpad-line, they are still built under the IBM-specifications, their other models seem to have some serious quality problems, at least lately I hear more and more complaints about declining quality

And yes the Linux-Story seemed to be a bit media-hyped

I had no problems with hp omnibooks so far (but make sure to buy their business-line, no pavillions)

toshiba and acer have good quality too, at least I had never any problems with them

I have a Dell D600 with the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG and worked supperb. The modem I have not tried to make it work since I have no use for it. Has a Smart Card reader that is not supported, have not tried yet the Infrared. The rest works great and play Enemy Territory with it.

The other is a Panasonic Toughbook CF-29. Works on Mandriva 2006 and 2007 No issues here beside the Touch Screen is inop and the Touch Pad performs not too good for my taste. On MS the Touch Pad still not to my taste. So this behavior is on both OSs. The Touch Screen works on MS. I use a Optical Mouse and works supperb.

The first thing to consider is why you need a laptop.
What is the purpose of the lapop?

The second question is how much you wish to spend......

That's about it...
From the minute a laptop is on the shelves its already outdated and having taken many apart they are pretty much the same on the inside down to the boards and circuitry.

If you want portability then a 12" IBook is a good bet... if you want power then a desktop is a better bet.
Unless you intend to use it as a laptop and use the battery then its just throwing money away... so battery life for me is important ....

Disk performance is always lousy anyway, even the newer 7200prm drives are nothing like a real disk. The effective usefulness is limited by battery lifetime, once the battery is gone then the replacment cost usually outweighs just buying a newer laptop...

Either way you are pretty much buying a luxury item that will be worthless in a year. Course they are lots of fun.... but laptops are made to be disposable not upgradable and there is more to upgrading than dropping in a new CPU. Think about the screen...when the laptop dies you throw out a perfectly good screen? Batteries cost a fortune to replace... and about all you can salvage is memory, disk and CPU. The rest is scrap.

If you want to do "work" then running a office suite is not so demanding and any $500 laptop is up to that.
If you want to run games then .... IMHO you have more money than sense... course its up to you what you spend your money on, some people buy $500 jeans....personally I'd much rather have a state of the art laptop... I'm just saying this not because you shouldn't buy a laptop BUT that you should realise what you are buying. If you realise all that and still want one then see rule #1.. what do you need it for?

If you want to transport it then weight and whatever you need to plug in to get it to communicate counts...(unless of couse you have a assistant who carries your bags)

If I was buying a laptop now I'd probably go for the 12" Ibook with an external screen at home... because its light, good battery and doesn't need stuff added to do the basics...anything much bigger (I have an old Amilo D) just gets left at home because of the weight....

What I look for is something portable, good battery life and able to play a DVD easily in hotels or trains/planes. Anything else is best done on a low end desktop much faster and cheaper.

I'm getting a 12" laptop from www.transtec.ch - it comes with linux preinstalled (novell/suse enterprise desktop 10) and the same hardware with MSWin would set me back almost 300CHF more (~250US$), so I'm certainly not paying the WinTax...
It's a Core 2 Duo, fully linux supported and certified.

Transtec can also be found as www.transtec.de .co.at .co.uk and as ttec.nl and then some.

aRTee.. forgot but I owe you this link from a long time ago

www.keynux.com

Hi, Artee I'm also thinking in order one transtec laptop. Have you already installed mandriva on yours?

I have been using laptops for what seems like forever. My first was a Toshiba 8086 class machine with a huge 20MB drive. From there I went to luggable machines which I kept upgrading whenever I would find a motherboard that would fit inside the case and could handle the display properly. I have had AST, Toshiba, Sharp and IBM machines. The ONLY machines that I will buy nowadays are the IBM Thinkpads although I do want to try out the new Panasonic Toughbooks ( I sail and want to run GPSDrive on the boat).

My first Thinkpad 380XD is still running and has been upgraded to Mandriva 2006. I sold it this past year to a writer who doesn't do anything but text and email. The battery is toast but everything else is just like it was on day one. Every key still works, the red IBM pointer has never been replaced, the floppy still works.

At the moment, I am using my T23 with Mandriva 2007. Everything works execpt the modem and those I don't care about. Sound, DVD, cd burning, USB, hibernation, wireless; it's all good. I have installed Mandriva 10.1, 2006 and now 2007 on 5 different T23s and they all work beautifully. Bang for the buck, the best machine around.

someone mentioned a dell d820. i've had decent success getting it installed on one friend's machine. but another friend with identical hardware said suse was spectacular on it.

Good point.... My friend had a gateway and the battery became toast... but it won't even start without a battery with some charge, even when plugged in! I actually have the old laptop she threw out and when I get time will rip it open and see if I can't defeat the built in obsolence but this rather illustrates the difference between the top notch and "disposable" ones...

p.s. check out the Mac laptops too....
The IBM's are solid and have the advantage of being useful in a fight... someone tries to steal it hit em with it and you'll do serious damage... (to them not the laptop)... whereas the Mac's are just lacking that weight

Anyway... as I have said before... the most important thing for a laptop is fitness for intended purpose as patrickrea illustrates....
For instance I have a friend who's main reason for buying a laptop is limited space and they have to clear the dining table to use it... battery life is not an issue since it can be plugged in... and I'll bet the IBM patrickrea sold would have done her fine... her primary concern was to be able to take it off the table in one go...

every laptop is a compromise so working out what you want in terms of features is the most important issue IMHO

Hi, maybe you can help me.
I'm going to work for a month in another country, so I'll be needing a laptop,
alas I've never had one and haven't tried to install Linux on one.

Have a budget of about 600 GBP

I need a laptop with a 15.4" screen and at least 3h of battery life. Oh and wifi to work too.
And it must not be problematic to install and run Linux on one (Mandriva, Fedora, Kanotix, I don't care).
I've no problems with editing some start up scripts, but please no kernel recompiles or edits.

15.4 screen, because I want to watch a film now and then and 3h because that's how long two lectures at the university last.

Please tell if you have anything suitable in mind!


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edit: Found something - HP NX7400 - http://ms.lv/?q=UutRzyfnz8xPa2LPr8wPlyfnzB...2LNzuxBeynPz8C=