[Wylug-help] Laptop Suggestions

[Smylers]

John Hodrien writes:

> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Smylers wrote:
>
> > * The laptop it'll be replacing (a Dell Latitude X300) is just
> >   1.4 kg, which has been really convenient.  I'm not interested in
> >   anything significantly heavier.
>
> I'd be really lazy and suggest another Dell.  ... a Latitude D430 or
> D630.

The D630 is 2 kg, but the D430 is a strong contender, and at under £850
(including vat) much cheaper than other manufacturers' alternatives.

> You also might find the external drive connector is the same as your
> X300.

It looks to be, though it doesn't seem to be possible to configure a
D430 without a 'Dbay and 8x DVD+/-RW Drive' so that may not be of any
benefit.

But I'm a bit concerned by this:

  This is not a synaptics touchpad, so the nice utilities for
  configuring those don't work.  So far I haven't been able to disable
  the bit too sensitive tap-to-click feature or turn this completely
  off.  Will post here if I find a solution.

  -- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD430#touchpad

My fingers are _very_ used to circular scrolling, as well as being able
to drag along the bottom of the touchpad for horizontal scrolling on
overly wide webpages.  I'd be disappointed to lose those ... but Dell
don't give the granularity of information needed to determine that (and
I really don't think phoning them would result in my discovering the
answer).

> > * I want it to work with a protector
>
> Previously I've got on well with cards that support dual monitor
> (which is most these days) combined with xrandr, and the gnome screen
> resolution doobrie.

I hadn't heard of xrandr, thanks.

> Seeing as the D630 has an nvidia chipset you should have as much joy
> with that as anything

The D430 has Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.  Any ideas on whether
that'll work?

> >   I note that many current laptops have 'widescreen' aspect ratios,
> >   whereas projectors do not.  What happens when plugging a
> >   widescreen laptop into a projector?
>
> Nothing very different than if it wasn't widescreen I suspect.  My X1
> (1280x768) screen resizes to 1024x768 with borders when I clone the
> screen to a projector.

Thanks, that was what I wanted to know -- whether there were borders or
stretching, and which of the displays it happened on.

> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Aaron Crane wrote:
> 
> > If none of those suit, you'll probably have to look at less powerful
> > hardware.  That said, your tradeoffs for price/power/weight may not match
> > mine.
> 
> I don't know what Smylers is like, but my 1.1GHz ULV Pentium M laptop
> is fine. 

Basically I've just been naïvely presuming that in the 4 years since I
bought the X300 technology has moved on such that anything currently on
sale will have more oomph than the X300, and therefore be adequate.

So I'm currently inclined to get the Dell D430 with Intel Core 2 Duo
U7600 (1.2 GHz).  But I'm still feeling very ignorant about this whole
business, so if anybody else wants to chip in with suggestions,
warnings, or re-assurance, please feel free.

> A good whack of RAM (1.25 in my case) still makes it a tip-top
> performer for the sort of things I use it for.

If I get the D430 with just 1 Gb of ram from Dell, then buying a second
1 Gb from Crucial is just £14, which is so cheap it's not worth thinking
about.  Thanks for your help.

Smylers