Linux friendly and powerful
Mar 26 '00
If you are looking for a very powerful notebook which sacrifices weight for features, look no further than the Dell I7.5k line. It is available in screen sizes up to 15.4 inch, and resolutions up to 1400x1050 pixels. The 15 and 15.4 inch screens are so large they hang over the edge of the full sized keyboard, though the latch mechanism is secure. If you are interested in opening this laptop for use on a flight in coach seating, you can forget it. The beautiful LCD's are just too large.
This is also a unit you don't want to lug too far without a well designed back-pack case, since it weighs in over 10lbs with the power adaptor included. Throw in a few books, some CD's, a floppy or two, and soon you have a pretty uncomfortable load. My biggest regret is not doing more comparative shopping before buying a laptop bag. Don't just go with the Dell offering: it's not up to the task.
This size does have advantages. The display is excellent and not at all cramped feeling... at 15.4 inches it's larger than many desktop displays! The keyboard is big and responsive, and the touchpad is well placed to prevent accidental mousing while typing (intelligent touchpad software in Windows enhances this, and gives you other features such as configurable "scroll zones" at the right and bottom of the pad). The CD or DVD drive is stacked atop the floppy drive, so you'll never be in the if-only-I-had-remembered-my-floppy-drive conundrum that so often plagues owners of modular media machines.
If you are interested in a portable Linux machine, I would highly recommend the Inspiron products. An excellent <a href=http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~steveh/inspiron/>support page</a> will get you up and running in no time, with full built-in support for the graphics chipset, and even native sound support, in recent kernels. I have had great success with Linux on these machines, using power management and suspend to RAM features regularly and without glitches (often not rebooting for weeks or months at a time). And the large hard drive options leave plenty of room for that *other* operating system to coexist.
So, to sum up: big and heavy, but bright, reliable, and powerful.
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Epinions.com ID:
jdsmith
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