Buying a new Laptop
 

Hi everyone,
Im planning on buying a new laptop soon to take to college with me. I dont want to spend too much, but I also want something reliable. I currently have my eyes set upon the Dell Inspiration 600m. I will be putting linux on it, and I will be using it for research, internet use, word processing, etc; no games or anything like that, so processor speed and ran arent *that* important. I might occasionally watch a movie or two, but that would be the extent of the heavy duty graphical use for this computer.

I was wondering though if maybe anyone has any experience with one of these. I was looking all over the dell website, but I was unable to find out what kind of battery life I can expect from this laptop. Perhaps someone here has used it and can tell me what I can expect.

Also, my school has a wireless network on campus. They recommend using a windows computer to connect to it. I dont know the details of it yet, but Im assuming that if a windows computer can connect to the network, so can a box running linux. Am I correct in assuming this?

Finally, does anyone think I will have any problems getting linux running on here? Im planning on running slackware 9.2 like on my home PC, but Im wondering if there will be any hardware issues.

If anyone could help me out here a bit and let me know about their experience with this computer, or even suggest a completely different computer, I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

first you should read this when it comes to linux and the 600m

next as of battery life, well if its a 8 cell then its going to last between 2 - 4 hours ...
and if you have the mobile processor expect upwards to 5 hours, and if you have
a 12 cell battery then the same is true .... it all depends on what you do, but the long
and short of it is, is that your basically going to get between 2 - 4 hours, no matter
what notebook you choose ...

and as you will see in the above link, it is possible to get the intelpro wireless working
that is integrated in this notebook ..

and again, refer to the link for getting linux to run on that notebook ...

according to that article it doesn't look like its going to be a walk in the park ..

I have a centrino power laptop which I have used linux on and off on for th last 6 months. It has a 14.1 screen and the 1.3ghz pentium M processor and while it has a relatively small battery, I can get 4-5 hours under linux without to much of a stretch. However, it did take me quite a while to get power management ect to run the way i wanted it to (although the newer kernels are doing pretty well).

Also with the integrated intel prowireless 802.11 adapter, it works for me under Knoppix. One of the problems with laptops though is that they are pretty much all differant. Id try googling for the model you are looking and linux and see if anyone else has done it allready. This would be a good palce to start: http://tuxmobil.org/dell.html (the parent site, http://www.tuxmobile.org) helped me out alot when i was looking for reviews of the laptop i bought (ibm thinkpad r40).

As far as getting online, I would be suprised if you could only get online wiht a windows system, but you might have trouble getting help. You might want to try searching the school's website for a linux user's group or searching through student personnal pages and see if anyone mentions running linux under the college's network.