(Untitled)

[av3rnus]

While arycogre yearns for that beastly Alienware laptop, I'm contemplating a Fujitsu Lifebook P7230Ultraportable. Good battery life. Low performance, sure, but should be good enough for my purposes: about the most demanding thing I'd use it for is playing a DVD

Comments

[evilmonk]

1) yes.
2) maybe, yes.
3) yes.

*twiddles thumbs*

[av3rnus]

Excellent...

Re: *twiddles thumbs*

[e_notimpl]

You lose the ability to search in the start menu with the classic view, though, which is sort of a bummer. Not that you could do that before, but the ability to type "(Start), W, O, R, D, (Enter)" to launch "Microsoft Office Word 2007" has been pretty useful.

You can turn off almost all of the right hand panel of the start menu in Vista if you don't like it - the only item I can't find a way to remove is the "Recent Items" entry.

Anyway, I'd just recommend giving the new start menu a fair chance before you disable it :)

[kunimatyu]

I'm not familiar with the details of Vista navigation, but I distinctly remember a few /. articles on personal info downloading to Redmond and some other fun DRM-based issues. It's one of the reasons why I went with OSX for a laptop, and why I'm keeping an eye on things like Ubuntu should the newest Mac release get weird about that sort of thing.

[av3rnus]

I tend to take anything posted on Slashdot about Microsoft with a very big grain of salt. Still, something for me to keep in mind. Maybe evilmonk has some word on this?

Regardless, I suppose if Vista gets too problematic, I could wipe the machine and throw XP on it. I don't know much about Ubuntu, but I might check it out if I get a chance since it's supposedly designed with usability in mind. My experiences with Unix/Linux systems thus far have left me thoroughly unimpressed.

[listener]

Ah, so the cute computer last night was new! This is the laptop I'm tempted by...

I'm just a vi-using, bottom-posting, Linux-advocating socialist hippy, so you might not want to take my word for it, but I've found Ubuntu to be quite user-friendly. One very nice thing is that the Ubuntu install CD is a live CD, so you pop it in, it boots up Ubuntu, and you can see how it runs on your computer, see what drivers get detected, get a feel for how it works, and even browse the web while you're installing the OS. No need to commit to anything to try it out.