laptop musings

Choosing my laptop two years ago was a no-brainer, I just went to OLS and saw the laptop that half the kernel hackers were using. My Fujitsu lifebook has proven to be a really nice laptop, with excellent design and construction and it's held up well over the years. But I've given it quite a beating, and it's beginning to show its age, with all the little rubber and moleskin bits on the bottom eroded away, cat scratches on the lid, a hard drive with three bad sectors (I know where they are), and worse, two dying batteries. I used to get 6+ hours, and would use it off wall power all day long. Now I get 45 minutes.

It's also not as fast as it once was, barely usable for viewing video, and some newer apps are annoyingly slow. So I've been mulling over whether to spend money on fixing it up for another year or find a new sub-notebook.

One of the hottest new laptops in this class amoung linux users seems to be the IBM X40. It does seem to be a solid and well done laptop, but I've just never been turned on by thinkpads for some reason. When I saw it in person it seemed a tad larger than the laptop size I prefer. It also apparently has a 1024x768 screen, a resolution I no longer find usable.

I browsed over the laptops at Dynamism and didn't see anything that really excited me there either (enough to pay those prices anyway), and it's not clear that newer fujitsu's are as nice as mine, so I decided to avoid getting a new laptop for now and just ordered replacements for both failing batteries. Much cheaper, I can live w/o the CPU upgrade, and the only thing I'll really miss the the possibility of a laptop with a brighter display that could be used in more direct sunlight.

Maybe I should use some of my laptop budget to attend the next OLS and see what the kernel hackers are using next year..