On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 07:54:52PM -0700, William Ballard wrote: > There isn't a thin-and-light laptop on the market today that I would > buy.
I'm pretty happy with my sharp pc-mm10. It's thin and light. With the big battery it runs for several hours. I bought mine and later had Emperor linux install debian on it, or you can buy one directly from them with debian installed (they call it a "meteor"). I guess there is now a pc-mm20. You do make compromises when you have a small and light laptop: Sometimes I wish I had an integrated cd/dvd drive. The mm10 comes with an external, powered cd drive. I can work for hours without power, but I'm in trouble if I need to read a cd. This has not been a big deal. Sometimes I wish I had IR. It would be nice to sync with a palm via IR. It's not too fast. A friend has a Sony laptop that is about 5 years old. The specs of the 2 machines are similar and they are similar in size and weight. The Sony machine has a 300 MHz Pentium. The mm10 has a 1 g-Hz Crusoe. I think the CPU performance is...similar. Other than those things mentioned it is a pretty good package and runs linux nicely. And it is small and light, if that's what is important to you. Has USB2, wifi, Ethernet, pcmcia. Oh. And it has this very interesting dock. With the device powered off, you can set the closed pc in the doc. It is now charging and the hard disk is accessible as a USB hard drive. -Kelly
