

What does a Hacker look for in a new laptop - yearsinrock

I have fairly powerful Desktop,running all different types of os like a charm,I am currently in the third year of my CS Engg., and I wanted to buy a laptop(dont know y ,just felt that i wanted one).So what is a coder/hacker like h/w configuration like( i recently started learning asp.net and already know c/c++ )Is a intel celeron m processor enough for coding needs
and is portability a issue (as u get in an asus eee pc)
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iigs
It really comes down to the features you actually need or desire.

Take a hard look at your workflow and usage scenarios:

Do you plan on running a lot of stuff at once? Visual Studio or Eclipse use a
lot of resources, you'll probably want to spend a bit on a better CPU and more
RAM.

If you don't tax computers very heavily, you might be better served spending
on a faster disk and skipping the extra RAM. I had a computer with 1G of RAM
that I upgraded to 2G. I actually preferred it with 1G because I rarely use
512MB, and I suspend/resume all of the time. Double the RAM doubled my suspend
time, and that's kind of annoying.

Consider your budget. Is this a short term discretionary spend or a long term
investment for you? I believe that it's better to buy current generation, mid-
high grade parts for some key pieces, electing to forego trendy cutting-edge
features, if you're planning on holding on to this for a while. If this is a
cheap impulse buy, skip the specs and buy the one with the neat bells and
buzzers.

How hard are you on your equipment? If you have peers with laptops, especially
some older or more used ones, look at the build quality and the things that
are going wrong with them. Some laptop manufacturers (HP/Compaq) do stupid
things like making the power cable connector L shaped, which makes the cord
into a lever when the cable is kicked. This lever prys on the connector's
soldering to the motherboard and trashes the computer. Some manufacturers
(Dell) make computers that creak and crack and sag as they age. Some
manufacturers (Toshiba) make the laptop lid position switch cheap and
unreliable, which makes the LCD flicker when the screen is open. Some
manufacturers (IBM / Lenovo) make computers that are tough and reliable but
are so ugly you wish they'd die so you can get something else. Some
manufacturers (Apple) make computers with such fiddly fit and finish that any
service, even by a trained professional, will cause the seams and gaps to not
be perfect anymore, which will annoy you because you paid a premium for all of
that fit and finish.

For myself I prefer full processors (no Celerons), discrete graphics cards
(perhaps passing on the current nVidias that are all failing right now),
sufficient (but not more than that) RAM, the fastest hard drives I can afford,
and the highest resolution screens available (1900x1200, particularly in a
15", is what I prefer). With this formula you generally have decent parts for
things you don't normally upgrade (CPU), and you don't blow your budget on
things that can be upgraded later for less (max RAM, larger capacity HD).

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noonespecial
Long battery life, light weight, and most important: fast wakeup and sleep
when I close the lid! This is _the_ most important feature to me. I want to
open it up, quick jot something down or check something and then close it
again. If it locks up or churns for 10 minutes before I can use it, its a non
starter. This has so far kept me on Macs.

~~~
anotherjesse
"This is the most important feature to me."

I agree with this, with the caveat that actually more important is
reliability. Our company bought a few Lenovo T60Ps - with how great the T43P
had performed, we thought it would be T43P++. Unfortunately the wireless cards
were VERY flaky. :(

So, I want: reliability so I don't have to futz with wireless and other
functionality - and then instant on and off. "Elastic laptop"

~~~
silentbicycle
If the biggest caveat is a wireless card, you can probably replace it.

I have a Thinkpad T41, which has been great except the OpenBSD driver for the
included wireless card was incomplete (due to being reverse-engineered). It
was only about $15 to replace it with a Ralink card; Ralink happily provided
full tech specs to the BSD devs, and the card works quite well.

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CaptainMorgan
If it were me I wouldn't go with a Celeron; for performance and cache reasons
the Pentium M is the wiser decision. Maybe if you're preferring wattage and
battery versus overall performance you'd go with Celeron. I run IDE's,
profiling and debuggers galore so I need what the Centrino offers.

All great points mentioned here. Lightweight; you can get real light these
days without being a DR. I love widescreen ever since I bought my new Thinkpad
T61p and the poor displays on the Thinkpads are a thing of the past. I highly
disagree that Thinkpads are ugly - they're made for efficiency and
professionalism, not for show. Linux; my machine came with SLED of which I
partitioned for my love of Ubuntu - gotta have Linux for kernel hacking and
that obsessive need for ultimate control of your OS.

All that said, I'm a power user and by that I literally mean I handle my
laptop ruggedly(and I'm sincerely not a klutz). For this reason I need a
Thinkpad for always on the go and durable performance. They take a beating and
their customer service(warranty related) is the best in the business. Had many
other brands that crapped out after six to eight months on average - Thinkpads
last on average three years before I call in for warranty service(high resale
value). My T61p is both lightweight, high performance, widescreen, and allows
up to 4 GB of RAM, rugged and goes with me everywhere while taking bumps and
bruises along the way. Need a new keyboard because your hackin skillz have
worn away the home row, space bar and number row? Call in a service ticket and
get a keyboard shipped out and arrived to your door in less than two
days(Bigtime priority).

Once you go Thinkpad, you never go back, at least for me anyways.

~~~
iigs
Most people I give PC buying advice to really don't think like I do -- either
they want a $400 computer, or they want some $2500 thing with some gimmick
feature set (custom color lid? who cares? lightscribe blu-ray burner? do that
at home! Vista turbo-memory? Why?). For this reason I sometimes over-discount
my own opinions about them when I'm advising others.

I personally agree about Thinkpads not being ugly (when I made that comment I
was referring to my wife's perception of them initially -- now she's a T61p
WUXGA convert as well).

I also agree about Thinkpad reliability, but I know the plural of anecdote
isn't data, and everyone's mileage varies.

I disagree about the T series weight. The T grew to fill the void left by the
discontinued ~7 pound A series. Yes it's lighter but I feel sorry for any
floor it might land on... but the computer will most likely survive.

I fancy myself a power / heavy professional user as well: I have a very low
tolerance for hardware related BS. I run minimalist installs of the OS of my
choice (XP at the moment). I expect to be able to throw my computer around
(while off -- I'm not a sadist) and not scuff or break anything. I disable or
order machines without gimmick features (Bluetooth is disabled on my T60p, I
got one without the fingerprint reader), and I don't use the full (software-
integrated) versions of drivers for anything I don't have to.

With this recipe, my Thinkpads have been very faithful to me over the last ~10
years, and Lenovo's going to have to really screw it up to lose me as a
customer.

Depending on what you're looking for I'd say that IBM/Lenovo is ahead of even
Apple on build quality. In my opinion Apple pushes too hard on fine design
(fine lines and edges, thin case designs) where the Thinkpad team designs
their machines to take abuse first and foremost.

If you're the type of person who values these properties I believe a Thinkpad
should be on your short list.

~~~
silencio
> custom color lid? who cares?

I care. I have to use the machine(s) every single day, sometimes for hours on
end. If it's ugly, I don't want to look at it. Same goes for accessories. It's
impossible to find a half decent non-black or pink womens laptop bag (I
believe there's a special and separate level of hell just for the color pink,
that's how much I hate it). I just stick with nondescript messenger bags,
which don't always fit the occasion but oh well.

My black MacBook has an engraved lid
(<http://flickr.com/photos/chix0r/2490375769/>). The biggest benefit is that
it sticks out like a sore thumb so I know it's mine, since so many people
don't do _anything_ to their MacBooks after getting one. Very convenient when
you're in a sea of Apple laptops..which used to happen to me at WWDC but now
also happens at pretty much any tech conference nowadays.

It also makes a great conversation starter with lots of people who are very
tempted to touch it..everywhere from airport security waiting lines to the
apple store and all.

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xenoterracide
I would get one of the smallest models I could. I'd also make sure it runs
linux. use desktops for power that's what they are good at, notebooks should
be portable, meaning comfortable to carry around in a bag for a while. Light
as you can get.

About the only thing I would invest in is at least 1G of ram, maybe even 2G.
laptops tend to ship with slower hard drives so if you start swapping you are
really going to have problems. maybe benchmark your average ram usage on the
desktop.

I've found that processor speed isn't as important as most people think, go
light you'll be fine, this isn't a server.

last note. I regret buying a desktop replacement laptop.

edit: when I say make sure it runs linux I mean make sure that it's hardware
is compatible with a linux install. That same hardware will work good with
windows, and gives you freedom of choice later. Or you can just get linux now
because linux rules.

~~~
sl956
Light as you can get AND linux friendly: that's exactly what I was looking
for. I am now the very happy owner of a sub-2 pounds, Ubuntu certified, 12.1"
laptop for 6 month, and that the best notebook choice I ever made. Right
choice for me, but I am only on the road 5 to 6 days a month, so your mileage
may vary if you are really a nomad worker.

~~~
seanb
I'm thinking of picking up something similar for traveling. What model are you
using?

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DarkShikari
I find one of the most important things is screen space. And I don't mean a
gigantic 17" screen; I mean DPI. I have a 15.4" laptop with a 1680x1050
screen; this gives me room to work. I've seen laptops the same size with
1280x800 screens; I don't know how anyone could do much of anything on those.

Don't get anything too heavy. Mine's just over 6 pounds, and that's already
pushing it.

Finally, don't worry about hard disk space; if you need lots, just grab an
external drive; they're cheap these days.

~~~
staunch
I use a 15.4" Dell Latitude D830 @ 1920x1200 and wouldn't trade it for any
other laptop made. I'd say 1920x1200 is about my limit for a 15" LCD, but if
anyone makes a 17" laptop that goes higher I'll be first in line. It's amazed
me for years how under appreciated the value of high resolution is.

~~~
anotherjesse
I had one of those screens, and I thought I would love it, but it ended up
causing too much eye strain. Major headaches! Now I prefer small screens with
moderate DPI on the go, and using a large external LCD when possible.

Right now I'm using a 37" 1080P LCD as my home monitor and an X60 as my
laptop. I use the LCD to keep various communication tools open and the large
LCD for coding/reading.

~~~
fharper1961
I'm using the same laptop + external monitor setup, but I'd actually like to
use two external monitors. For me, screen space and RAM are the two important
factors.

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smanek
For me, the killer feature is battery life. I used to have a macbook pro, but
I'd get ~3 hours batter life at best (and only 2 hours, when doing heavy
work).

I sold it, and bought a thinkpad x60, and get over 6 hours of battery life
(4-5 hours under heavy load). I love that I can basically use it all day
without worrying about battery.

Pretty much any machine has a fast enough cpu for the kind of work I do - ram
seems to be the big bottleneck now. (virtualization + firefox + emacs + python
+ sbcl + ... all take their toll).

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gtani
Most important: minimum 30 day return policy, no restocking fee if poss. You
need to take the laptop to coffee shops, office, home, train, see what's
annoying, like glossy screens may make you crazy. So i recommend Amazon,
Costco, Target.com for returns policy

things that can render a laptop unusable:

\- poor display, keyboard, or wireless card; excess fan noise or heat.

nice to have: fast Core 2 Duo, minimum 2G RAM, if you're doing lots of
compiles, spidering (DOM tree extraction), database indexing, anyting that
pegs CPU's for more than a couple minutes.

like everybody else, my first choices would be macbook or Macbook pro/ Vmware
fusion/ Windows XP and ubuntu, or thinkpad with XP/grub/ubuntu (i don't think
you can buy them with XP pre-loaded anymore). Toshiba, Dell, HP still sell XP
pre-loaded (the "downgrade option") Macbook is only model < $1800 that has DVI
out, which makes a big difference

Toshiba satellites aren't bad, mine's been reliable for 3 years. Read the
amazon reviews.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268438>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182>

------
sh1mmer
An Apple logo.

(Joking aside, I refuse to work on anything else any more, life's too short to
fight your OS)

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Paperflyer
If you work much, you want a high display resolution. However, the laptop
still has to be small, so there will be a compromise. Personally, I would go
for something like 1280*768 on 13", which is both small and possible to work
with.

The other thing you really want is silence. And battery life.

Even if you code a lot, CPU speed is rather irrelevant. Any Core2Duo will do
(dual core and 64Bit are great to have). But RAM, you can't have enough -- and
since it is cheap at the moment, don't bother and directly upgrade to 4G.

For me, this is a MacBook, but there are plenty of alternatives. For example,
the FSC Lifebook series is really great. If possible, look for those business-
offerings. They tend to use a little older but more reliable hardware, which
can really save your day and will most certainly enable you to run linux.

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ashleyw
Personally, a Macbook Pro. I want a laptop to be fast to boot, reliable and
nice to work on. Technically OSX is what does all this, but you asked which
laptop you should buy, and you either get a Windows Vista or OSX machine. (not
to mention getting a Windows machine and booting some flavor of linux, or
creating a hackintosh, if thats what you want to do)

Spec wise, I'm running on a Macbook Pro 2006 model with a Core Duo 1.86Ghz
processor and 2GB of ram, and I'm doing great. I'm sure one of the latest
models with a C2D 2.4GHz CPU would be a bit faster, but I don't do anything
too intensive (light photoshop is probably the limit of my number crunching
apps). So pretty much anything you buy today (except the ultra-budget
machines, of course) will suit you for your needs. Just make sure you have a
nice amount of ram! :)

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evilneanderthal
Purchased an Eee 1000H and got it up and running today.

Blew away the default XP install for Heron. Had to fidget with some packages
and the kernel a little to get it all going smoothly. Not too bad.

What sold me on it was the ergonomics (keyboard's perfectly usable, 10.2"
screen) and the portability (5 hours of battery with continuous use; I let it
sleep when I wasn't using it and went all day on a single charge).

The goal was to have the laptop on me at all times so I can get work done
anywhere.

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timcederman
High DPI, lightweight (I can always plug it into an external monitor if I need
the real estate, so 13" monitor at most), large disk (for portability of all
my files - I have a fileserver at home and use offline files), long battery
life.

If you want to code, don't get an Eee PC.

For general hacking, processor speed these days doesn't seem to be an issue...

~~~
yearsinrock
wat abt celeron m processor can it run visual studio?

~~~
xenoterracide
if it's 1.5Ghz or more then you'll have no problems. Unless you are doing a
lot at once you can probably get away with 1Ghz and maybe less. Ram is killer
and remember this is mobile not your primary coding box.

~~~
timcederman
Thanks -- I forgot to mention RAM. I use anything with less than 2gb now, 3gb
preferred.

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amour
since you have a desktop, get decent average laptop(dual core, 2gb ram, big
HDD, internal cd/dvd-rw-unless you don't mind lugging an external one,
wireless card, and comfy keyboard).I tried coding in eeepc 7" screen and it
didn't get me far. I used 12" asus ultraportable running linux for years and
they are good and has pretty solid build. Unless you're getting a linux
certified one or buying from a linux-laptop vendor, chances are some features
won't work. I just recently switched to 17" mbp because my coding activity has
demanded it (more horsepower and screen real estate), but keeping my 12" for
fun hacking and cracking. Both lappies has one thing that's very important for
coders: NICE keyboard. That being said, choosing a personal laptop is like
choosing a GF/BF: it's personal, only you know your coding habit and which
feature is the most important for you.

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matthall28
A MacBook Pro :)

