Laptops/Notebooks

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010, Ken Moffat wrote:
>Sorry, OT, but I'm soliciting opinions on decent laptops that would allow
>dual boot, windows 7 and Debian/Ubuntu. Looking at 15" screen, HP, Acer,
>Lenovo, Asus, maybe Dell. I'm thinking of longevity. Opinions? What to
>avoid?

My preference is a 15in Macbook Pro running VMware Fusion or Parallels.
When replaced my Titanium Powerbook last August, I got one with 4GB RAM,
planning to upgrade to 8GB when the price comes down.

I'm currently running VMware Fusion with CentOS 5 and XP Pro VMs which are
very nicely integrated into the normal Mac desktop without the necessity of
using multi-key escapes to switch from the VM back to the native desktop as
VMware does when running with Linux and X11.

All of the non-Apple laptops I've used were IBM Thinkpads which I tended to
use for about 5 years (running Linux of course :-).

I swore I would never use a laptop without the button mouse in the
keyboard, but would have a very hard time going back after using the
Macbook Pro's touchpad with gesture support.  Even though most of what I do
is run xterms ssh'ing into Linux servers, I find the touchpad with ctrl,
cmd, and option keys works quite nicely with X11 instead of a three-button
mouse, well enough that I very rarely use an external mouse.

Bill
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