http://norman.walsh.name/2004/08/25/newLaptop 7 152 2004-08-25T17:25:45-04:00 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh I’ve decided to get a new laptop about a year ahead of schedule. Now all I have to do is compress a year’s worth of agonizing about which laptop to buy into a period of a week or two and I’ll be all set. I’ve decided to turn a recent financial windfall into a new laptop. This is about a year ahead of schedule, which is nice. Now all I have to do is compress a year’s worth of agonizing about which laptop to buy into a period of a week or two and I’ll be all set. The machine I’m replacing is a Toshiba Tecra 8200: 1Ghz, 30Gb disk, 512Mb RAM, 1024×768 resolution. It’s no slouch, but it’s my primary machine and I’m ready for an upgrade. I’ll probably retire the 8200 to run http://norman.walsh.name/, which will be a major hardware upgrade for the site. With a real machine behind the public server, I might even move some of the production there and set things up so that I can publish to it from the road, perhaps with the Atom API. The obvious “big question” replacement-wise is, do I switch? The 15” PowerBook is sweet: 1.5Ghz, 80Gb disk, 1Gb RAM, 1280×854 resolution. Lots of stuff will “just work,” like playing DVDs, and I’ll be able to get “off the shelf” software for common stuff. Plus I can get a small price break through my employer. But it’s a proprietary OS ( Edd Dumbill made this point a year or so ago and it’s stuck with me). And it has one mouse button and a touchpad. Blech! (I don’t use an external mouse or keyboard and I’m not going to start now. At least not as long as my wrists hold out.) At the top of my x86 architecture list today is an IBM ThinkPad R51, not least of all because it has a TrackPoint™. It’s sweet too: 1.7Ghz, 80Gb disk, 1.5Gb RAM, 1400×1050 resolution. Word on the street is that Linux is well supported, so everything I’m currently doing will “just work”. Plus I can get a small price break through the employer of one of my friends. I could even avoid the thrill of doing my own install from scratch! The folks at Emperor Linux sell “Raptor”, an R50p, nicely configured. I can’t easily tell what’s significantly different on the R50p and the R51. [Update: The differences are small. The R50p is 1.7Ghz, 60Gb disk, 1.5Gb RAM, 1600×1200 resolution. So the R51 has a bigger disk, but the R50p has a 1600×1200 display. Sweet. If I go x86, I can support Emperor Linux without sacrificing any features I want.] I need a coin and a crystal ball: “in two years, I’ll be happier if I buy ________ today.”