I'v been disputing what kind of laptop to get. I here IBM is very good, but they seem to only use Intel Pentium 4/Celeron. Is the Pentium 4 Mobile good compared to Athlon XP??
Second, HP/Compaq I'v seen laptops with Athlon XP, are HP/Compaq notebooks very good??
And finally, what kind of laptops are good to run Linux on [ie that have real modems, reconized soudn card, ect]??
ThanX!

What are you looking for in a laptop..

Performance, Weight, Money or other?

I've always gone by Dell, though I've heard compaq computers were very light and good value for money (this was a few years ago mind)

There was a linux laptop site but they seemed to have faded away. Go i486 or Pentium 1 ! Whey! Honestly: search google for linux laptops, hardware problems are a thing that stalks laptops in particular.

Uhg, well, wieghts not an issue. I'm a big person, so wight doesnt' bother my much.
But, yeah, mainly money and preformance.
But, is the Mobile Pentium 4 better than the first desktop Pentium 4??

i486 laptops?? Maybe with much memory it would work, i586 with 192MB does runs Linux pretty smooth, but I woudl probly want a somewhat faster processor.

Yeah, I'll do some research, I just thought I'd ask for any sugestions. Thanx!

Dells did have problems with Linux, but depending what distro you get there are loads of sites dedicated to getting linux working with dell comps.

Intel P4 Mobile?? I thought the chips in Laptops and desktops were the same. Hmm.. I'll have to do more reading up on it :P

Then again, I've never had to buy a new chip or rip my Laptop apart (apart from to get the CD-Rom working and put in a memory upgrade.)

No, laptop processors generally run at lower voltages causing them to produce less heat. If I was going to get one I'd go with a mobile athlon xp 2200

Oh yeah.. I remember now..

i486 laptops heat up enough to fry bacon and eggs on them.

Generally some private laptop manfucaturers will boot and sell you a linux laptop. With Mandrake, Redhat or anything. There are a few companies all easily acessible on google.

Laptops area waste of money...

I still have one though :)

They're bad value on one hand but its so damn useful to be able to move them.

Lately, I looked at Apple laptops, they seem quite interesting.

My boss got a new laptop made by some no-name Taiwanese company. He got it at Office Max for $900. It is a very powerful machine, very thin, and the screen is gorgeous. I can't remember the name of it at the moment, but it was pretty cool.

Personally I won't buy another laptop until they get 10 hours of battery life. They could do that right now if they just made the right combination of features. Here is my ideal laptop:

* 400 MHz cpu (with OS controlling the clock... 25-400MHz)
* 256 MB RAM (on the same chip as the cpu)
* basic 1MB video controller (separate memory for video)
* integrated 802.11B wireless networking
* Two USB ports (one on each side of laptop, left and right)
* Gray-scale TFT screen (with mechanical dimmer for backlight)
* 10x11.5" footprint
* 20GB IDE hdd w/16MB cache (with lazy writes)
* One video mode: 1024x768, 8-bit gray, 85Hz refresh rate
* 10 hour battery life on single large built-in battery
* no other crap like serial, parallel, vga, cdrom, floppy, IR, firewire, touchpads, eraser-heads, color, pcmcia, etc.

Your "ideal laptop" is a big pile of shit. You can get everything in a laptop you can in a normal computer. I've seen laptops with SCSI RAID arrays

...They just cost a hell of a lot more...

And use tons of battery power.