As the subject says, I'm in the market for a new laptop. I know this has been posted a zillion and a half times before, but computers are constantly changing, what was perfect yesterday is now yesterday's news. So this is mainly what I'm looking for:

Durable. I left my thinkpad i1300 on top of my car one day in my rush to school, and it came flying off the roof as I was pulling out into 45mph+ traffic. I picked it up off the pavement, and aside from a few scratches, was perfectly fine. I want that again!

nVidia graphics
Intel Core duo cpu
decent linux-supported wireless card, or else a laptop that doesnt complain if I replace the internal one like, HP's do
any hard drive, I have a brand new 120gb already
any DDR SDRAM, or else 512MB+ DDR2
less than, say, $1500

I don't care really about screen size, widescreen is a plus but not really necessary. I also need TV-out, which most laptops have nowadays anyways. Bluetooth, IR, 56k, etc I could care less about, but USB 2.0 is a must have.

I am researching this, but I'd like feedback from folks who've either bought laptops recently or else know the brands better than I do. I'd like another thinkpad, but IBM won't list the graphics cards on their recertified thinkpads, and I don't want Intel's crap graphics chips, even if the linux drivers are open source (I'm a bit of a gamer too). BTW, I don't really want an HP, this ze2000 is a 14 months old and has more (hardware) issues now than my 7 year old thinkpad ever has.

Hya,

Reading your story, I also have good memory with "IBM thinkpad", which no longer exists. Cheap Chinese imitation is as crappy as they can be.

Spec you post does not seem to be difficult to find.

Not easy to find out what does not appear in catalog spec (how often hardware error happens, how good quality plastic is, how cheap keyboard is...)

Did you have trouble Compaq one (pseudo HP) or real HP one?

Happy Penguins!

Exactly. On my HP, the cable that goes to the LCD is junk, it went once while it was still under warrany, so I had HP replace it, but now it's going again, so the screen only works if you hold it just right. The eject button on my PCMCIA slot is the same way, it was replaced at the same time as the LCD cable, but it's broken again. And the AC adapter at least didn't go until after the warrany was up, so it's now held together with electrical tape. Not to mention that it runs hotter than hell, the CPU regularly gets up to 60C+ before the fan kicks on.

Yes, it's a real HP-branded heap, ze2308 to be exact. The other brand I'd like to avoid is dell, just because I've had bad experiences in the past (I used to work on the things all the time).

Thanks for any help!

The problem with notebook computers these days and the past is they are constructed by ODM and then delivered to companies like HP/Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and many others. Motherboard brands like Asus, MSI, and ECS makes notebooks from the ground up. Toshiba notebooks includes Atheros for wireless NIC, so you should not have any trouble. The wireless NIC uses mini-PCI, so just about any mini-PCI card can work. The problem will be is finding them.

Lenovo provides IBM systems. Only their 3000 notebook series provides nVidia graphics. The thinkpad series only provides ATI which is harder to setup. I do agree that Intel graphics support in Linux is poor.

It is hard to choose a notebook. I and others can not make it any easier. Any notebook computer that you buy needs at least a warranty of two years. More is better. I recommend a three year warranty. Yes this makes it costly, but buying a new one when you did something dumb is also costly.

From all the notebooks that I looked at in the past and to this day, I still put Apple Macbook on the top of my list even though it has Intel graphics. Apple's notebooks is the only ones that provides 6-pin IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire or i.Link) connections. Mac OS X can not be beat. IMHO, Apple notebooks are a lot better investment than other notebooks.

You should invest in a carrying case that has a lot of padding. Probably putting it in carrying case may reduce the chances of you putting it on the roof of the car because of the strap giving you more hands.

Notebook computers do need more attention than desktops. They need to be clean more often than desktops.

There many brands and stores that sells notebooks. Powernotebooks sells notebook computers with or with out an OS on selected brands and models. Sager notebook computers are the cheapest.

No offensive but putting a notebook on top of the car is a funny story.

BTW, I have not yet own a notebook computer.

I already have an atheros minipci wireless card that i picked up off ebay for my HP. Problem is, the HP gives an error on boot if you try to use anything but their specific wireless cards. Yes, there's a BIOS hack for it, but I don't want to risk a bricked laptop.

HP, Compaq, and several other brands are made by Quanta, more of their customers are listed here. Notice that Apple is also in that list, as is Toshiba . That seems to be the "avoid" list (I didn't really want a mac anyways, they don't make the 17" macbook in black yet).

It looks like I'm probably going to go with an MSI notebook, although I'm not sure which one, I have some googling to do (to find out about linux issues). I guess what I was really looking for was a Core 2 duo (or even Turion 64 x2) laptop that used a PATA hard drive and DDR SDRAM, so I wouldn't end up having to sell (for much less than I paid) the stuff I've bought in the last year for this computer, the hard drive only being 5 months old. But, it seems I'm not going to find that, so time to suck it up.

None taken, looking back on it now, I think the same thing, although I've gotten wiser since then. My new laptop came with a cheap little targus case, and I bought a well padded backpack designed to hold it not long after.

Even if you find a notebook that accepts PATA, the drive will not last long after it has been dropped. Use a 2.5 inch enclosure that uses either USB or IEEE-1394.

Hard part in your search will be finding out what brand and model of the wired NIC. Stay away from Marvell Yukon chips. If you pick a Linux distribution that uses the latest kernel, SATA should work. Also stay away from Seagate SATA hard drives.

No no no, the thinkpad falling off the car was 3 years ago, or do you mean that the hard drive won't last long after the PATA standard is dropped? I think PATA hard disks will be around for a long time to come, heck, memory manufacturers are still making SDRAM, etc. And when you really look at it, SATA isn't much faster than PATA, 150mb/s vs. 133. That would easily be made up by the fact that I've got a 7200rpm drive, which most laptop companies charge a serious premium for, I'm finding out. I just really don't care to pay all over again for something I JUST bought.

Also, I found a site that will sell barebones MSI laptops, I think I might just go that route and get the rest of the parts off newegg, depending on which way is cheaper.

Good advice, thanks! I looked into seagate's new technique for arranging data on the platters, and I got the impression that it still has a lot of bugs to be worked out before I'd trust it, especially in a laptop that's constantly moving.

Anyways, I guess this thread is pretty much closed, although I'm still not sure on which model I'm going to go with. Thanks for all the help!