Long story short - Former R&D engineer for an Industrial Equipment manufacturer that bellied up in the early 90's. Needless to say once the word got out that I opened a small consulting business lots of old customers came calling - so while not a true road warrior, I do spend some time in the Pac NW and Brazil. I used to swear by Sony laptops on a length of life vs cost basis.
Friday while using an electrical transformer for a desk (*idiot*), turned on equipment, went out to watch and document changes, transformer got hot and physically MELTED my laptop. Dickering with the insurance company netted me about $3900 US after other misc expenses to replace the machine. What I don't spend on the laptop, I won't get.
Soooo - since it isn't a matter of value, someone sell me on a decent machine in the 3500-5000 USD price range.

Must be Pentium. I code in C and optimize my code for Pentium processors, as all the equipment I program uses them.
Prefer all peripherals on board, as docking stations can be a pain in the field.
On-board Ethernet is also a must. I use both card slots for I/O cards.
OS doesn't matter, as I'll drop Slack and VM ware on it regardless of what comes pre-installed.


Fire away people....I'm not good at spending cash (read - I'm a miser) so I've never looked at machines in this price range.

check
seagle computers
and
chemusa.com

only recomendations as per

There is no selling allowed in the forums. If you are interested in advertising you can email ads@linuxquestions.org.

Of all the laptops that I have owned I like the Toshiba's the best. The Sony's are very good as well. The one that I currently own is the 1955-S801. It has desktop power as it uses a desktop P4 chip. It is very durable and has done well with the amount of hours that I put on it.

The P25 is huge (17" widescreen) but linux works magnificent on it. A friend of mine just purchased this one.

If you want the biggest, baddest SOG you can find then the Toshiba P25-S609 may be the one...wouldn't be the most compact for flights though

If you wanna try to blow the whole wad then check out a Fujitsu.

IBM ThinkPads, of course. I have the T40. Even though I don't have Linux on it (I need Windows for my Finale music notation program), it's a sweet machine. And ThinkPads tend to be expensive.


BP

001A

I went with this
http://www.alienware.com/Configurato...KU-PERFORMANCE
with an upgrade to 22' display, 3.2 P4 1 gig RAM and integrated 802.11g on the advice of some guy with an afro at Circuit City lol. Now I'm waiting for the UPS man

Oh wow....I had that thing up to 4300 USD. Didn't see the 22" display thing. Pretty l337....

I have an IBM i-series 1200, currently running only Mandrake 9.2. I don't recommend it. That whole hard drive failure thing that IBM is being sued for is for real. I had a really bad crash on not only my laptop, but also two IBM workstations at work (one of them actually had two drives crash). That's four hdd crashes on three machines in less than an f***ing year. In all fairness, I don't know which series of IBM machines are affected by this, but I guess it could be found out with a quick web search.

My family also have two new Dell Inspiron 5100 laptops. What I don't like about Dell is that there is very little choice in configuring the system, and that they force you into purchasing not only Windows XP, but also office suites and graphic software, and I believe some other software packages, too. On the other hand, the machines themselves seem to be excellent, and the customer support is very good.

Regards,