On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 20:04 +1000, Lindsay Holmwood wrote:
> On 9/13/07, James Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Can anyone recommend a laptop that is small (11.1 - 13.3 inches),
> > reasonably fast, and can do suspend (both to RAM and disk) easily? Oh,
> > and that I can buy now; old models aren't so interesting to me. Ubuntu
> > is my OS of preference, but if it makes a difference, I'd consider
> > switching to something else.
> >
>
> I've been eyeing off similar configurations the last few months. My
> recommendations:
>
> IBM x61(s)
> HP Presario B1973TU
> HP NC4400, TC4400
> Toshiba Portege R500
> Sony Vaio TZ90 (Japan import only)
I saw the TZ90 when I was in Japan, and very nearly impulse bought it.
I'm fairly sure that the TZ90 is this computer:
http://www.sony.com.au/vaio/category.jsp?id=34641
with a Japanese keyboard. I've certainly seen the same 1.2GHz, solid
state drive configuration in .au. The American page for it has a bit
more detail:
http://tinyurl.com/2fjerp
I currently have a HP nc4010, which is ok. The battery life is a bit
disappointing, but I was dealing ok with that, until I bought a new
camera. Now I'm finding that this machine is struggling just to generate
thumbnails of my photos.
It's this processor speed concern that makes me wary of the TZ; jpeg
processing (AFAIK) is not parallelisable, so I'd be stuck with the speed
of a single core, and whilst the instruction latency is substantially
lower on the Core architecture, I think I'd probably only just break
even. Larger L2 cache might help, but the memory access patterns for
JPEG are well understood, so presumably any modern implementation would
use prefetch instruction to mitigate that. Does anyone know if this is
the case in the standard OSS jpeg implementations?
> I have no idea about how well Linux works but I assume the IBM x61 and
> HP TC and NCs are well supported.
Well, the Sony seems to be full of Intel bits, so it would probably be
ok. I'm just a little wary of it because we have a Vaio SZ in the
office, which has very odd bits of proprietary stuff around the Intel
goodness (like a switch to toggle between two video cards; toggling this
switch does not do good things to the Linux).
I hadn't thought of the Thinkpad. That might be a good option. And it's
got a "real" Core chip at 2GHz. Does anyone know if it does
suspend/resume ok?
Thanks for your help here Lindsay. Those are some good suggestions.
James.
--
James Gregory -- http://codelore.com -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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