# Minimal laptop

## guero61

I'm thinking about buying a little, low-powered laptop (P-II 450 or less or equivalent) and installing Gentoo on it to use as my main machine to run around to classes and such with.  My question is this -- I find a lot of them around for $200-300, but is it worth the buy?  If so, which ones?  Ebay (I usually hate them) seems to have some fairly decent ones, but I've just no experience with laptops, so I don't know what's good, what's acceptable, etc.

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## notkevin

 *guero61 wrote:*   

> I'm thinking about buying a little, low-powered laptop (P-II 450 or less or equivalent) and installing Gentoo on it to use as my main machine to run around to classes and such with.  My question is this -- I find a lot of them around for $200-300, but is it worth the buy?  If so, which ones?  Ebay (I usually hate them) seems to have some fairly decent ones, but I've just no experience with laptops, so I don't know what's good, what's acceptable, etc.

 

Well, I guess it depends, when I was in college I had a laptop. When I brought my laptop to class I found it to be more of a distraction then a help.  I found lecture notes alot easier to take on paper since I often draw pictures and stuff. With that being said, that does not sound like a bad deal, I haven't been in the market for a used laptop, but I have a friend that was buying Pentium laptops last year for about $100-$150 a pop. I would make sure that the laptop is supported by linux before I purchaced it. IIRC there is a webpage that has a list of laptops that people have gotten linux to work on.

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## matt2413

I've been a fan of Dell's 3500 series.  Very thin for that time, runs dual batteries for 4.5-5 hours,  and decent durability.  They came in PII's at speeds from 233-400mhz.

Matt

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## bender-high

I have been using a AMD K-6 475 MHz laptop as my main

machine for a few years now.  It is a HP Pavilion N3250.

12.1" screen, etc.  I added a bigger HD and more RAM.

I have used it with Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian Woody, Knoppix,

among others.  Everything works, but I never tried the

WinModem.  Even PCMCIA ethernet and WLAN works fine (Vortex/Boomerang

and Orinoco_cs).

One just sold on Ebay for about $210.  Most sell for aout $300.

I would buy another, as they are solid.

Since they are about 3 years old now, you will probably

need a new battery.  The battery is selling on Ebay for about $80.

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## guero61

Is there any brand to just stay away from, or that is kind of delicate?  I'd like a halfway-rugged machine, as I don't exactly want to have to walk on eggshells for it.

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## antik

 *guero61 wrote:*   

> Is there any brand to just stay away from, or that is kind of delicate?  I'd like a halfway-rugged machine, as I don't exactly want to have to walk on eggshells for it.

 

I have Panasonic 166MMX Toughbook(CF-25) Notebook and upgraded hdd to 20GB and memory to 96MB. There is 3 PCMCIA slots, so I can use WiFi, CompactFlash, modem, 100Mbit lan.

LiIon battery life is about 2 hours.

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## cybermans

when u compile kde go on holiday it takes long long time over here on my compaq 1200xl103 (450 mhz now with 160mb ram). ANd its drive me insane to get kde working

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## guero61

Ah, but I'm patient -- I've already installed a P-100 with 40MB of ram!

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## french tony

I have a tosh portege 3110ct. 

300MHz, 128Mb ram after upgrade, 6Gb hd.

it is _tiny_. Smaller than a A4 page, and less than 1" thick. 

of course, the display is pretty small 10" @ 600x400.

but it rocks. gentoo runs fast on it. 

I use it for college (programing, little bit of wave editing, email and stuff) and partys ( 2 alsaplayer open at hte same time for crossfading tunes manually)

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## mlynx

I'll second the Panasonic Toughbook recommendation.  I picked mine up used for $350 (CF72 PII-300, 196M RAM, 6G HD).

It has been the perfect machine for me, mostly because I can safely toss it in a backpack, in my car, whatever.  I tend to be rougher on things than most and so need something able to take some abuse.  The toughbook really fits the bill.

The only thing that has been problematic is sound (I have it working, but it's been a trip to get it there).

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## jt42

toshiba tecra 8000 PII/266

Works fine for me and I've done some fairly nasty development things

(apache+mod_php+postgres+mod_ssl running on laptop while editting the code in gvim and viewing the pages using mozilla-1.3.1 -- very slow, but it didn't crash)

The only real downside for me was the amount of time that it took to get things compiled.

-john

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## jimlynch11

my roomie has a IBM X20 ( i think ) which is pretty damn small and light, and has plenty of power (128 MB of ram, 600 MHz, etc.) 

he doesnt take it to class much just cuz he's lazy, so he has it running as a full-time CS lanserver  :Smile:  which also runs a full-time apache server doing a stats page for the server....

i know thats not what you were looking to do, but if it can handle that im sure it can handle taking notes and bangin out some code.  did i mention its light as hell?

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