Josh Saddler

I'm in the market for a laptop. Been looking for a few months. The one I have is . . . too old. 6+ years old. Turned it on the other day and got a slight shock where the power cord runs into the cracking chassis at the connection between the screen/hinges and the body. Still runs, but man. Ouch. So, I'm in the market for a replacement. If I find one, it'll be my one real Christmas present. I'll be doing development on it, general desktop usage, and (ideally) the stuff described below in bonus #2.

I have the following critical requirements:

1) Must run Linux. I don't want to repeat the hardware issues of my Toshiba Satellite 2805-S603. I want something that isn't broken for Linux. This usually means excellent support for all areas of ACPI. As far as which Linux it'll run . . . Gentoo is desired. Well, duh.
2) Cheap. Under $700 (ideally under 500-600), including tax, shipping, and any upgrades. If it's really cheap; I can just buy a new cheap one in a few years.
3) Light. Ideally about 5 pounds. Lighter is better. Current laptop about 12 to 17 pounds. If thrown, will flatten most small pets. Not that I've tried.
4) Battery life. 3 hours minimum, I think. What's with today's laptops, many of which boast "Up to 2 hours!" "Up to 1.5 hours!" "Up to 5 minutes!". Are we going back to the dark ages in laptop technology? Heck, even my old laptop had almost 2.5 hours at its prime, and it sucks juice like a dehydrated Californian on a smoothie.
5) Wireless built-in. Something natively Linux-compatible; no ndiswrapper! Must work with WPA.
6) Video. Must have at least a 14.1" screen. 15.4" would be better; I'm looking for an upgrade of my current 15", 1024x768 laptop. Also, the video hardware must be able to do smooth 2D; enough for perfect DVD playback, or other video playback. Also, though I don't currently use any, the capability for smooth accelerated eyecandy is ideal. You never know; I may want it in the future. Would like to have the ability available. However, please don't throw video driver drama at me. I'd like to stay away from that at all costs.
7) Sound. Please, please let the sound work. This includes headphone and microphone jacks.
8) Portage & desktop power. My current laptop is a 1ghz Pentium3 with 128MB RAM. It's not enough to compile anymore. This is why I only sync it once every few months, if ever. It's just not enough to do anything anymore, desktop-wise. Even Fluxbox feels like too much, as well as being useless compared to my beloved Xfce. Everything gtk+ or Qt-based (including applications) runs slooowly. I need something that will make running Gentoo worthwhile. Just Enough Power (JEP) to last until the next upgrade a few years down the road. I learned my lesson about trying to "future-proof" a laptop in 2001. Spent like $2500+ for the absolute-top-of-the-line laptop bundle. Look where it got me.

The following are optional maximally awesome bonuses:
1) Dual-core. Excellent in and of itself, and related to:
2) DAW. Powerful enough to work as a digital audio workstation. I'm not sure if a low-end single-core Celeron or VIA processor is enough for that. And I'd need to pack a USB-to-MIDI cable, I know. I'd like to start doing some serious composing, recording, and arranging on my piano, which is currently way across the room from my desktop workstation. Much easier to take the complete portable workstation to the nonportable piano, rather than the other way around.
3) Working suspend. Not actually a requirement for my laptops. Weird, isn't it? I always just do cold shutdowns and starts.
4) 3D games! Would be nice if I could play Linux games based on the old-school ones. Stuff like Tremulous, Quake, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, and various old(er) Windows games via Wine. My current laptop can do this, though it only has a 16MB nVidia GeForce2 Go chip. Makes even some of these games painful. It's still powerful enough to kick blackace and latexer's collective butts at Tremulous! If the replacement laptop can even (gasp) deliver UT2004, I'm sold.

* * *

So. I'm hunting for a new, used, refurbished, or recertified laptop. One that meets the above critical criteria, and maybe even some of the optional bonuses. I have yet to find anything truly attractive from the big names such as Dell, IBM/Lenovo Gateway, HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Sony, etc. But it's possible I've missed something. Any suggestions? What portable computing devices have made you happy?

If Comcast is your ISP, dump 'em if you possibly can.

Find out what's up with your connection.

Packet hacking. Makes me wonder what my own provider, Cox, may have been up to. At least I don't really see them making news the way Comcast does!

Damned American ISPs. When this stuff occurs, there's usually nothing we can do about it, as there's only one provider that owns the wire running into the home. I've got no choice if I want internet service; it's Cox or nothing. But I've no complaints, aside from more brief outages than I care for, and measly bandwidth for the (slowly increasing) money. It's slowly gone up to $26.95 per month, and that gets me 1.5mbit/sec down, 256mbit up. In more normal numbers, that's 200kbytes down, and 32kbytes up, which is why I make few big changes to my devspace. Takes forever to upload or change content.

My anemic rates are typical for American ISPs. That's a basic connection by the way; it's considerably more if you want the next two levels of service, and there's no guarantee your monthly bill will stay the same. We've already had a bill hike once or twice because Cox "experienced increased operating costs" and made an extremely poor business decision by passing costs directly to the consumer. I was paying something under $20/month, it was $10/month before that, and now ... $30 for a basic internet-only package. No cable, no phone, just basic internet.

Apparently, Europe is ahead of most everyone in the world; no matter where you are, what country or city, there's something like at least 16 different ISP choices. Or so some of the guys in #gentoo-dev like to brag. And they get more bandwidth, too. I saw some statistic that said Japan leads the world in bandwidth per capita; some ridiculous number like 56mbit per person. That's one wired nation. The US is behind almost everyone; we're being beaten by some developing nations, even. Though some 3rd world/developing countries have it even worse than we do; I remember a news story that reported Kazakhstan has a real-world price of well over $1000/month for basic access similar to mine.

What are your experiences with ISPs and service levels for a given cost? What's your connection like?