Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I’ve never particularly liked notebooks. They are clumsy, uncomfortable, hot, slow, weird, and hard to fix or upgrade. And expensive, of course.

But circumstances are changing now in such a way that I’ll need to have a notebook pretty soon. We can’t manage on a single computer nomore, and there is no place to put a second one. Plus I am way too often moving around.

I am not in a hurry yet, but I can’t delay the purchase for another six month. Tha gives me enough to time to study the options and compare the prices.

So far I haven’t done any research what-so-ever. And with this knowledge I am looking for the following:

• IBM ThinkPad T41 notebook (I’ve heard lots of positive comments about this particular line of products, and it supports Linux pretty good too.)
• Fast CPU is not an issue. Even 1 GHz will be enough.
• RAM is good, so I’ll need more. 1 GByte is pretty close to perfect.
• I don’t want an elephant in the bag, but I want something bigger than my mobile, so the ideal size of the screen is 15″.
• Well-supported video card - NVidia MX-series or something similar.
• CD/DVD/DVD-RW is a must.
• USB is a must.
• WiFi card, supported by Fedora Linux 4 or later is a must.
• 10/100 (or maybe even 10/100/1000) Mbit Ethernet adapter is a must.
• Soundcard with line-in (read: Skype) is a must.
• Battery life is not essential - if it can live and work for 2-4 hours, then it’s good enough. Usually, I am pretty close to power lines.

That’s pretty much what I have thought of at this moment. Any suggestions, ideas, or pointers are very welcome.

P.S.: The system will be running Fedora Linux and Fedora Linux only. No dualboots to Windows or anything crazy like that.

P.P.S.: Notebook can even be second-hand, if in good condition.