[Tfug] Laptop choices

[ebenblues]

> Priorities: low budget, reliable as everything, runs Linux/BSD
> How do y'all feel about an IBM T20ish v. T30 v. T40ish v. T60?

I've used a T41 at work for the last year and a half and have been very satisfied with how durable and high quality it is. I haven't had any problems with it yet, although I know of some coworkers who got theirs around the same time and had hard drive problems after a year. They seem to run linux without a problem (I had slackware installed on mine for a while and I know others who have installed SuSE and Redhat/Fedora).

If you want a really good price, I recommend looking on ebay. My wife wanted a laptop about 6 months ago, so I went on ebay and was able to find a used T23 for ~$350. It's a P3 with 512MB of RAM and built-in wireless. Not sure what you're going to use yours for, but this is more than enough power since my wife mainly uses it for web surfing, word processing and basic image manipulation via GIMP. I was a little worried when it came with a clean XP install and no drivers for the thinkpad hardware, but IBM/Lenovo provides an excellent installer program for Windows that automatically installed all of the drivers I needed for the T23. Here's the URL for that installer:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=SOFT-UPDATE

I doubt they have an installer for linux, but here are some sites I found through google on installing linux on a T23:

http://www.math.uakron.edu/~chad/linux_t23.html
http://www.alex.org.uk/T23/

I'm sure people have written up similar pages for other thinkpad models.

> Are the newer machines really worth the money?

I would recommend going with a newer model as your budget allows, because the T41 has some nicer features than the T23, in addition to being faster. Some notable differences between the T41 and T23:

-T41 is thinner and lighter than the T23 (don't know the exact dimensions/weights).
-T41 has metal hinges (T23's hinges are plastic and tend to break over time).
-T41p supports resolutions higher than 1024x768 on the laptop screen.
-T41 has hard drive shock protection (if the laptop is shaken or falls, it will stop reading/writing to the hard drive to prevent internal damage). You probably won't get this feature running linux, unfortunately.
-T41 includes a touchpad mouse in case you can't stand the TrackPoint mouse stick.
-T41 built-in wireless adapter supports 802.11a/b/g (T23 only does 802.11a/b).

Hope that helps,
James


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