laptops

Clarifications

An Acer Travelmate 4220 (new) and an HP Pavilion n5470 (1999-2000 era). The HP is an excellent, though slow laptop. It is now my Linux playground. The Acer is so far an excellent little machine for the money. I use it heavily for work purposes and it is holding up nicely. Time will tell. If it lasts as long as the HP, I will be one happy camper.

Both models have keyboards that don't have a lot of spring to them - good for me as I have lead for fingers. By this I mean that the entire keyboard doesn't shift downward when I type (as I have noted Gateway laptops do).

My only complaint with the Acer is that XP came loaded on FAT32. Strikingly ridiculous. The Acer Empowering Technology is also crap and I disabled it.

HTH

edit to add: Acer came with built-in wireless. But I have never yet used it.

look for one you like, and browse around a bit.
I personally use HP products and have had few problems. Others here would disagree and state to go for another company.

It is all in preferences. Find something that you like, and go with it.

Also, what kind of wifi? few notebooks will have built in for pre N, but do have a, b, g.

Also, WalMart apparently is selling a linux notebook for a good price ($300). It may be worthwhile to check it out.

Without more information about what you want out of a laptop, or how you'd use it, I'll give three suggestions:

For cheap and ultra-portable, look into the ASUS Eee PC. It costs less than almost anything else on the market and is pretty darned nifty -- if you like laptops about the size of one of those clamshell purse makeup thingies.

For a more professional-grade laptop and a bit more money, my all-time favorite is Thinkpads. I pretty much use them exclusively. They're reliable, high performance machines that have a sleek, professional look (instead of the "Fisher-Price toy" look of most laptops these days). They tend to use quality components in the things, too.

If you're looking for a Mac -- well, get a Mac.

(edit -- more detail: Macs are pretty much universally excellent hardware. I'd rate them right up there with Thinkpads in terms of hardware quality alone. As far as the default OS that comes on it, I prefer MacOS X over MS Windows for a number of reasons, all pretty much entirely technical reasons related to MacOS X just being a better designed OS. I don't like the one-button mouse thing, though, and whether I got a Thinkpad or a Mac laptop I'd probably replace the default OS with FreeBSD, so the default OS doesn't matter to me much. It might to you.)

All three can run OSes other than MS Windows or MacOS X, if that's your cup of tea. In fact, you can get an Eee PC with a Debian-derived Linux-based OS on it, and I think Lenovo is selling Thinkpads by request with SuSE Linux on them. I happen to be typing this from an R52 Thinkpad with FreeBSD running on it, and everything works brilliantly.