Selecting a New Laptop

My laptop died. It was the only Windows machine in the house - now I have to decide whether to replace it and if so, with what.

I purchased the Compaq V2000 back in 2007 to help me deal with some of my customers who still insist on using Windows. I've had a Toshiba laptop for a number of years and it still works, but the battery has died so it is no longer portable. It has run Linux since I purchased it and I never really missed Windows because I could run VMWare on it and run Windows inside a virtual machine if I really needed it.

The selection of laptops and other portable devices has grown so much in the past few years that I'm truly confused about what to purchase.

On the one hand I've found an almost direct replacement for mine on Craig's List - another V2000 that has a slightly faster chip and better graphics but would in all likelihood simply allow me to swap hard drives and boot as if it were still my old one - a great saving in time, which I begrudge spending on anything unnecessary these days. I categorize setting up a laptop as unnecessary because of all the cruft and crap the vendors put onto their retail system these days. Driving a stake through the heart of yet another bloated system's sell-ware and sniff-ware and Norton and Windows sampler and on and on... These take time - last time I did it that was several hours wasted before I could do anything useful.

The first thing to do is re-install the operating system after re-partitioning the hard drive. You see today's laptops come with huge drives - and anyone who is travelling by airplane today is best off not keeping much in the way of real data on their machine in case the border guards decide to look at it and keep it for a while. Nobody wants the pictures of that weekend away from the kids on their laptop going through border inspection.

Once Windows no longer takes up the whole drive I'll put Linux on it - probably Fedora Core 12 - the latest bleeding edge release from the Red Hat development tree. It runs well on most of today's hardware and has a lot of interesting features that work well with what I'm doing.

Then of course there is setting up all the various tools and such that I use as a matter of course - stuff that just doesn't come on Windows but has to be put there. Things like Open Office, CYGWIN (open source utilities that run on Windows) which includes X-windows and my various secure access tools.

And of course Skype, and my video suite and the tools I use for streaming video - all that takes time. All in all about a day's worth, just to get it back to the point where I feel it is useful.

Anyway - I went and saw the Craig's list one and bought it - swapped my old hard drive into it and it booted right up. Saved me a day at least, and probably about $500 as the one I'd picked as the replacement new machine was about $699 plus tax, which in itself says something. You see the original was about $1800 when it was new. The prices of laptops have come away down - and their basic capabilities have gone up. Faster CPUs, all 64 bit (the Turion in my V2000 is 64 bit but the Windows isn't - but when I finally put Linux on it that will make a difference) and almost all have 4 Gigs of RAM. The only drawback, one which would have added more time to getting things "right" was they all come with some form of Windows 7 and I'm not interested in having to upgrade my other Windoze software to match it - so I'd end up struggling with things until some sort of peaceful coexistence between open source and closed source came about - or I changed my ways and did things differently.

So... peace is once more - at least until this laptop dies

richard