failing like never before

15Jul/081

The Laptop Search

Its about time that I finally got a laptop. I'll be starting my second year of college this fall, and it'll be nice to be able to have a laptop to take to class and the library. For the past few years, I've had the same desktop, a Pentium 4 3Ghz, with 1gig of RAM and an ATI Radeon x800 xl, and it has been quite good to me. I'll be sorry to part with it.

I think its best, when shopping for a computer (or indeed, shopping for most things) to specify what one wants, or does not want out of it.

  • So firstly, I want it to able to run Linux well. I've no qualms against diving into configuration files and getting dirty, but I still want a Linux friendly machine.
  • Pretty much every laptop these days comes with Vista installed. I hate Vista, but fortunately I have an official ISO image of Windows XP Pro 64-bit, so I want a laptop that will play nicely with Windows XP. (Were it up to me, I would never use Windows, but I need certain programs for school, like Visual Studio, DreamWeaver (Yuck! I can write my own code, thank you very much.), and CAD stuff.)
  • I'm not a gamer, so an integrated graphics card would be fine. I would actually prefer to have an Intel integrated graphics because I know Intel tends to be pretty open with their graphics cards. Nvidia would be fine, but not as preferable as Intel, and ATI/AMD is definitely out of the question.