ForumGarden

I'm also very fond of Dell laptops. i've owned two in a row, and they are built like tanks (in the good sense, not that they weigh 6 tons!). i still have my first one, an inspiron with a whopping 300Mhz pentium III! the top of the display was hit by a falling piece of rebar, which left a dent in the plastic at the top, and cracked the hinges - but it still keeps ticking. my second one is a P4 1.4ghz i think, and is also a very nice machine. weighs a lot less than that first one. and trouble free as well.

as far as other brands, i know that HP makes some good laptops, as does Sony (the sony more in terms of multimedia and bling bling so to speak), and IBM is renowned for their laptops. but i've never used any of those. i helped a friend get her gateway laptop fixed, and i would definitely stay away from that - cheap materials that break are no good for a laptop!



and don't forget Macintosh. Their high end laptops running OS/X are rockin' machines, and being based on freeBSD, they are killer for someone interested in UNIX.

if you're looking for light, go for sony or toshiba. i believe they make the slimmest models around. though of course you pay the big bux for that privilege!

UNIX is one of the grand-daddy operating systems. it was invented in 1969, and it is the software that runs most of the internet. almost all webservers on the net run unix, and the majority of mailservers etc.. it's an 'industrial' operating system. Linux is what most people have heard of, it's a 'workalike' to unix.



i've been using UNIX since 1986, and have been a unix systems administrator since 1994. i love it - it doesn't crash.

Jwolf,

From a laptop warrior to the world:

Buy Dell.

Run from Compaq. Run from Sony. Both of these machines look good. Both have "visually pleasing" bells and whistles. But like a good looking exotic car, they'll break on you. Components, chassis, keyboards, hinges. You name it, they are crummy.

IBM's are nice. Just like Jaguars. When they run, they run gooood! But expect them to be in the garage a lot.

HP? No comment. Never owned one.