231 lines
6.0 KiB
HTML
231 lines
6.0 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
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<HTML
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><HEAD
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>Special Considerations When Buying Laptops and Netbboks</TITLE
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>The Unix Hardware Buyer HOWTO</TH
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><A
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NAME="laptops"
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>7. Special Considerations When Buying Laptops and Netbboks</H1
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><P
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>First, don't be misled by the term "netbook". A netbook is just a
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small, low-priced, low-power laptop with relatively small solid-state
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drives. Because the display and drive capacity are small, netbooks are
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basically just good for email and surfing. If you're going to do coding
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or even much word processing you'll need something more like a traditional
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laptop or desktop.</P
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><P
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>Up until about 1999 the laptop market was completely crazy. The
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technology was in a state of violent flux, with <SPAN
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CLASS="QUOTE"
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>"standards"</SPAN
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>
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phasing in and out and prices dropping like rocks. Things are beginning to
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settle out a bit more now.</P
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><P
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>One sign of this change is that there are now a couple of laptop lines
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that are clear best-of-breeds for reasons having as much to do with
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good industrial design and ergonomics as the technical details of the
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processor and display.</P
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><P
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>In lightweight machines, I was a big fan of the Sony VAIO line.
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I owned one from early 1999 until it physically disintegrated under
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the rigors of travel in late 2000, and could hardly imagine
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switching. They weigh 3.5 pounds, give you an honest 3 hours of life
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per detachable battery pack, have a very nice 1024x768 display, and
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are just plain <EM
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>pretty</EM
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>. Their only serious
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drawback is that they're not rugged, and often fall apart after
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a year or so of use.</P
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><P
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>If you want a full-power laptop that can compete with or replace your
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desktop machine, the Lenovo (formerly IBM) ThinkPad line is the bomb.
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Capable, rugged, and nicely designed. I now use a ThinkPad X61, the
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lightest and smallest machine in the line, and like it a lot.</P
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><P
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>These machines are not cheap, though. If you're trying to save
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money by buying a no-name laptop, here are things to look for:</P
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><P
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>First: despite what you may believe, the most important aspect
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of any laptop is <EM
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>not</EM
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> the CPU, or the disk, or the
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memory, or the screen, or the battery capacity. It's the keyboard
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feel, since unlike in a PC, you cannot throw the keyboard away and
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replace it with another one unless you replace the whole computer.
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<EM
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>Never buy any laptop that you have not typed on for a couple
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hours</EM
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>. Trying a keyboard for a few minutes is not enough.
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Keyboards have very subtle properties that can still affect whether
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they mess up your wrists.</P
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><P
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>A standard desktop keyboard has keycaps 19mm across with 7.55mm
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between them. If you plot frequency of typing errors against keycap size,
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it turns out there's a sharp knee in the curve at 17.8 millimeters. Beware
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of <SPAN
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CLASS="QUOTE"
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>"kneetop"</SPAN
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> and <SPAN
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CLASS="QUOTE"
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>"palmtop"</SPAN
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> machines, which
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squeeze the keycaps a lot tighter and typically don't have enough oomph for
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Unix anyway; you're best off with the "notebook" class machines that have
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full-sized keys.</P
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><P
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>Second: with present flatscreens, 1920x1200 color is the best you're
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going to do (and that is on a 17in widescreen, which translates to a large
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notebook. On normal size notebooks, a maximum of 1440x900 is more common).
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On travel machines like the Lenovo X serties, you're still stuck with
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1024x768. If you want more than that (for X, for example) you have to
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either fall back to a desktop or make sure there's an external-monitor port
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on the laptop (and many laptops won't support higher resolution than the
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flatscreen's).</P
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><P
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>Third: about those vendor-supplied time-between-recharge
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figures; <EM
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>don't believe them</EM
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>. They collect those
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from a totally quiescent machine, sometimes with the screen or hard
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disk turned off. Under Windows, you'd be lucky to get half the endurance
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they quote; under Unix, which hits the disk more often, it may be less
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yet. Figures from magazine reviews are more reliable.</P
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><P
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>Fourth: You can now avoid many of the driver hassles involved in
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getting some devices on your notebook to work (or week well) under Linux by
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purchasing a notebook with Linux pre-installed. Dell has recently started
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to make noise in this regard in the Linux community. Taking this approach
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limits the set of notebooks you can consider, but the one you get is likely
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to "just work" (including sound, useful capabilities like suspend/resume,
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and even hotplugging of external displays and projectors) to a much higher
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degree under Linux than others.</P
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HREF="noise.html"
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>Prev</A
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>Next</A
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>Noise Control and Heat Dissipation</TD
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><TD
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> </TD
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>How to Buy</TD
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