AMD64 Laptops

[pkdawson]

Hi all,

I'm in the market for a high-end Athlon64 laptop. So far I've only found three companies that sell them:

* iBuyPower
* eMachines
* Compaq (HP)

Now, I'm leaning towards Compaq. I know HP has a pretty poor reputation in the PC market, but of the three, they're probably the most reliable. It's also very nicely priced.

- Athlon64 3400+
- 15.4" WVA WSXGA+
- 64MB GeForce 4 440 Go (I don't care, I don't play games)
- 1GB (2x512MB) RAM
- 80 GB hard drive
- DVD-ROM/CD-RW
That comes out to $1,579.

An equivalent iBuyPower laptop (with a 128MB video card, granted) is exactly $200 more. Sooo, leaning towards the Compaq.
And then we get to the WiFi. All that Compaq offers is Broadcom stuff, which doesn't seem to be supported in Linux at all. Oh well, I'll spend a few bucks on a replacement. Not a big deal, I suppose.

What I'm looking for here:
1) Experiences with Compaq Athlon64 laptops.
2) Recommendations for other brands of Athlon64 laptops.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[ledskof]

I plan on steering clear of HP branded Compaq laptops for a while.
My company deployed about 25 compaq nx9010s and I've already personally replaced hard drives on 5 of them. The one I'm working on today has a bad motherboard.
There have also been at least 1 screen replacement, 1 modem replacement, and 1 other motherboard replacment. My opinion is that 8 incidents out of 25 laptops in less than a year is not good numbers.

But at least they are more reliable than Dell. We stopped using Dell a year ago. We have a guy here who loves Dell and got his new company laptop (few weeks ago) with us from Dell; one of the new wider screen ones, high performance etc.. He had technicians out replacing parts 3 times within the first week. of recieving it.

Check out the AMDZone Notebooks forum. They have some recommendations on laptops there:
http://amdzone.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewforum&f=49&sid=813bc7567c54dbb07ecac41ee41a179e

I'm getting a laptop through the company soon too and I'm thining about getting the Acer Ferrari 3200. All of the other laptops I've seen performance numbers for that match or exceed it cost a lot more and I can only spend so much (not as much as the guy who got a Dell).

[Ian]

I have almost that same laptop, smaller harddrive.

It's great, I love it, there's plenty of people who I've found with the same laptop trying to get Linux on it, there's at least 4 or 5 pages detailing what needs to be done.

My only problem was a fucked up mother board that died right away, but a week later I had it back and I have KDE up and running on it after a day (starting from nothing but XP Home).

My only problems now are the sound (it was working, wish I knew what I broke) and wireless (which was never working and never will work unless Broadcom gets a swift kick upside the head).

Oh, and go for the 1920x1200 resolution, it's beautiful .