Check my sig oldcpu. You don’t have to look further. My tx1000 fried 4 times with the Geforce 6150 chip.
That’s why I go ATI now. 
For anyone in the UK looking for a high end laptop that runs with Linux you could do worse than having a chat with the guys at Welcome to Kobalt Computers - High Performance Custom PCs and Notebooks.
I sent a few e-mails back and forth with their customer service guys. They’re very knowledgeable and totally based in the UK and pleasant to boot.
They offer the laptops without Windows (subject to a rebate). They’ll also be happy to set up partitions for linux for you and pre install windows apps on your system like thunderbird or itunes, Cyberpower dvd etc. The rep told me that they’ve already got some customers with fully functional linux on their G860s.
They’ll provide the laptop with a backup image on an external drive/partition of the initial system and they’ll be happy to provide hardware support, although they’re not qualified to cover linux support.
Of course you’ve got to want a powerful laptop in the first place. I says on their website that they’ve got some buisness grade laptops coming out soon as well.
Certainly worth checking these guys out. They’ve had some decent write ups in custompc as well: bit-tech.net | The UK’s leading source for Hardware and Games reviews
Forgot to say. I’m planning on buying one off them in the not to distant future once I’ve returned the hunk of useless metal that is the Dell XPS 16 i7, supported by people with brains made of equally dense material.
There are some interesting computers there. Very high end. Very very very nice!! Still, I dont think I would buy one because of my travel requirements.
One consideration that I had when I purchased my Dell Studio 1537 (which I am happy with) was its support world wide. Dell do have good international support, compared to some other brand of laptops.
This sort of international support is not so important to many users, but back 12 years ago (in 1997 to 1999) when I was living in a small hut in the beach in Thailand, and doing data analysis on the stock markets and currencies around the world, and trading with my Compaq laptop, having a reliable system was very important. I switched from Win95 to Red Hat Linux back then, but having a reliable OS was never my main concern (as win95 sort of worked, and Red Hat was reliable for what I wanted to do). Instead my concern back then was the reliability of my hardware.
While Compaq may not have the most reliable maintenance record, they are very well supported internationally, and it is easier to get parts for them than it is for many other laptop brands.
I recall taking my laptop to a laptop support shop in Hong Kong and in Bangkok a couple of times (and then later in Ottawa Canada), to have something broken repared. I also talked to some of the maintainers inthe shops that specialize in laptop repairs. From that I learned that no-name brands are not supported. One typically has to go back to the original supplier of the laptop, who may or may not offer support a few years later. Who may or may not have parts for a laptop a few years old. And who may or may not charge a fortune for parts for a laptop a few years old.
I was able to get my Compaq repaired a couple of times in less than 8 hours, and in other times in less than a week. It was cheap in Hong Kong and Bangkok. It was expensive (but still possible) in Canada. That sort of international repair is not possible for many other brand of laptop PCs.
Hence from that I learned the best bet, if one travels a lot internationally, is to get a very well known and supported brand. HP/Compaq, Thinkpads, were easy to get fixed when one is travelling internationally. Some other popular brand names were not so easy, and brand names that were not comon were mostly impossible to get repaired when travelling.
Losing the use of a laptop for 6 weeks, while it is shipped internationally for repair, is a big outage with no PC.
Of course PC prices are much cheaper now, and its cheaper to have “backup” PCs now, than it was 12 years ago, but still, I think for people who travel internationally, its a consideration to have a well known brand name.
My view (and also having talked recently to some shops) is Dell is easier to get repaired than some other brands.
Again, the world has changed in 12 years, but still, for the international traveller who wants to be able to get a hardware repair in less than 1 working day, a common laptop brand is essential.
It’s certainly a fair point to make.
I’d personally go with HP for international business laptops or maybe Lenovo, though I still think they charge a bit of a premium.
Dell business I am no doubt sure is very good just like their buisness laptops but their consumer side is dire.
Just to recount my experience with Dell consumer side:
I was lied to when buying my laptop about the issues that were affecting it. Lets give them the benefit of the doubt and say Dell India don’t really have any information about their newer laptops.
When I rang tech support, three months after the model was released they’re still waiting for a BIOS fix, which won’t fix it because the design of the system is fundamentally flawed (components with too high a power draw in an old system that isn’t rated for anything above a 90 watt PSU). There is also sound leakage from the speakers and the system is so crippled it may as well have an older CPU in it.
As a comparison the similair spec Dell precision laptop costs more but comes with a 210w power adaptor.
Kobalt do offer Europe wide cover, so from a consumer standpoint it’s got your average user covered most if not all of the time.
You can’t really reccomend a Dell for consumer laptops. Their consumer tech support is abismal, their design far from being made to last and once it’s out of warranty the repair costs are likely to make it more economical to just get rid of it. I hear a similair story from HP consumer side laptops as well.
Really we would need a load of breakdown threads for this review:
Business laptops
Workstation laptops ← little bit of this as well
Power/Gaming laptops <---- where I’m at
Multimedia laptops
Cheap laptops
Netbooks.
If I go Business I’d go straight for a HP Probook without hesitation. (they come Suse certified)
Indeed, one does pay a premium.
My own approach is not to place reliance on their help lines after purchase. Typically, the type of problem I encounter is not going to be one that a “help line” for a company like Dell will solve. For example, in our Dell, the wireless in the Vista partition stopped working a few weeks after the Dell arrived, and countless phone calls of support from my wife could not get it fixed. BUT since openSUSE worked well with wireless, I refused to let her ship the laptop back to Dell. In fact, before we purchased the laptop, I made it clear to my wife that I would not return the laptop for a Vista problem, if Linux was working !
In truth BEFORE purchasing that model Dell, I researched the history on the laptop and its problems with Linux (it was available in some parts of the world with Ubuntu pre-installed) and so the sort of hardware problems you encountered (reported in your post) simply were not there. I believe that my research before my purchase ensured that, and increased the probability of my having a happier laptop experience.
If one wants to buy blindly on a brand name, then IMHO that can happen with any model laptop, all though some model laptops are more likely to have a problem happen than other models. I have some brands I think have a lot worse power supply and thermal problems than Dell, and as noted, if one is careful with research, one can get a superb Dell computer. I can NOT over emphasis the importance of some pre-purchase research of a specific model. The Internet is full of blogs, youtube review/videos, etc … by private people of many laptops.
What would worry me more, because of my international travel, is having a laptop that is broken (possibly due to my wife or my physical negligence - I once dropped a laptop … 
) and not being able to repair something simple on the laptop because its a NO NAME brand and the part can not be obtained at a reasonable price.
Your point is noted for those who can’t be bothered to do the detailed research.
We’re seeing this kind of issue affect almost all of their new consumer i7’s.
I did my research and there was little available data at the time. All the reviews from over 8 different sources rated the laptop excellent with good performance as did the starter pages on the forums. I think I spent a good deal of time researching it and sadly I now don’t have the technical capability to rewrite a BIOS and resolder resistors to a motherboard.
I will admit I should have waited for more people to buy the system perhaps but when you ring up a company’s sales team is it truly unreasonable to ask them to give you an honest answer to a direct question about the product? Other companies I have subsequently contacted have been quite frank and open about issues of Linux compatibility and i7 throttling.
I would still recommend a Dell business laptop as their customer service is excellent as is their build quality as I have experienced but you need only trawl the Dell forums to find they’ve made a massive error consumer side with almost all the new i7s as they haven’t revised the platform just upgraded the components. Subsequently they are in denial about the issues and are afraid that admitting them would cost millions.
It’s a little like someone buying a Nvidia graphics card with excellent performance reviews, just to find that the stability of the card is flawed and the company is in denial about fixing it or buying a Ferrari that’s throttled to run like a Fiat Panda that you’ve just paid supercar money for.
Ok, waiting a few months to see which models have problems and relying on your own ability to fix issues rather than having to waste hours with technicians who are in denial about the problem may be one way of going about things but it hardly falls within the Sale of Goods Act and it certainly doesn’t constitute good customer service. For international travel you can of course get a similarly specced Precision which will cost you a little more but will provide you with exemplary international service.
Perhaps being on a linux forum, where most users will have a much higher than average understanding of computers, some of these issues may be avoided through patience and personal knowledge but it gets my goat that this is a company who would sell to people like 95% of those who I work with in my office and would not bat an eyelid at ripping them off and providing them with poor customer service.
Hi,
on the subject of AMD (ATI) graphics in laptops, all I can say is that I have a laptop with a mobility radeon 3850.
The Amd proprietary driver works fine here except for one problem : if, under KDE, you turn “compositing” on (which is necessary for the eye candy), then resizing a window is incredibly slow (several seconds (!!!) between clicking on the window border and the window being redrawn).
This is due to AMD’s fglrx driver.
Apart from that, everything works great.
Lenwolf
That is strange! Is that in 11.2 or 11.1 ? I have a radeon-3450 on my Dell Studio 1537 with 11.1 and KDE-4.3.4 the proprietary ATI driver and it works amazingly well. I see no such effect. I did not install 11.2 with that laptop (yet) because of concerns from testing with the 11.2 liveCDs and the 2.6.31 kernel working with proprietary ATI driver (which I loaded ATI driver and ran from RAM as a test).
You can buy dell laptops with ubuntu linux preinstalled and they offer best hardware and software support
@Oldcpu
That is in 11.2, 64 bit version, standard Opensuse kernel, nothing special.
I don’t think I tried 11.1 on it, but am not sure. If I did, the problem was there.
See, e.g., here: [Bug 208770] Slow windows resize on fglrx and compositing - msg#00189 - kwin](http://osdir.com/ml/kwin/2009-10/msg00189.html)
It seems that it is not only due to the fglrx driver but also present in radeon driver.
Lenwolf
Doesn’t happen to me though. I have an HD 3200 and resizing is just fine.
@michael_cheah
Do you have desktop effects and compositing enabled?
Lenwolf
I also did a lot of research on laptops, and for my needs, this one came up tops -
Notebooks Acer Aspire 8940G-724G100WN
It has everything I wanted - big 18.4 screen with a decent 1920x1080 res, multiple hard disks (for easily adding an ssd later), reasonable performance Nvidia GPU (also it’s socketed and can possibly be upgraded later), flush screen mounting (I hate the dust collecting abilities of laptops), and extremely important for me is the backlit keyboard!
You can buy them for under half the European price in the US, and with shipping and tax it still comes out much cheaper. Although I much prefer the German keyboard and we get a 2 year warranty over here (you could buy 2 units I guess, and still save cash!).
But I decided to save €1000 and get a desktop for now. Once I have more cash spare I will reconsider my options.
Oh yes, and reports on a laptop forum I frequent also confirm (as I suspected) that Linux runs perfectly on it :D.
That’s pretty nice I’ve got to say. It’s just the size of it that puts me off; otherwise it’s pretty much perfect.
It all depends on what you want to use it for, for my needs bigger is better and I really don’t care about weight.
I’m sick to death of squinting to see a tiny screen. You realise just how bad it is when you get to use a full-size screen (and as your eyes get older too I guess!).
I can’t believe these notebook manufacturers, making 17 and 18 inch screens with a ridiculous 1600x900 resolution! What a waste of time and money, what’s the point?
I’m even finding my nice new 22" 1920x1080 a bit too small, and should have gone for a 1900x1200 instead, but of course they cost a lot more, and this one was really cheap :D.
Yep - it’s what you need it for. Now for me, weight is more important than screen size. Usually when I need to work, I have an external monitor available. I get little work done while actually traveling.
Just a note about reliability and getting the things fixed internationally: I took my Toshiba to Russia, and got excellent service in Moscow. My company had Dells, and we often had to ship them back to get them fixed if something went wrong. I used to love the Thinkpads, but I’m just not so keen on the Lenovo’s. The quality hasn’t seemed as good. But this whole bit about getting them fixed has made me rethink my shopping restrictions - I was looking at Toshibas, Lenovos, and Asus. I’ve always had great luck with Asus m-boards, but could I get an Asus fixed in Moscow? I haven’t the faintest!
mark dsp wrote:
>
> Hi guys,
>
> my apologies if this is replicated somewhere else I’ve done my best to
> have a look around and it appears the last post like this was from
> 2008:
>
> It’s less of a support question than a reccomendation question.
>
> I’ve been researching laptops and I now know roughly what I want. A
> core i7 cpu with a mid-high end graphics card with 1gb or VRAM and 4gbs
> of DDR3 and a 720p+ screen. I’d like to start learning how to use Linux
> and Suse seems a fairly good distro, though I’d also like t dual boot it
> with windows 7 professional (x64).
>
> The obvious choice is Lenovo but my budget doesn’t stretch much beyond
> £1200.
>
> I am tempted to go the easy road of buying a probook 1310s which is
> already certified for Suse and would save me a packet but there would be
> a load of compromises hardware wise.
>
> I quite like the new Dell XPS 16 laptop with the core i7 chip inside
> and also the HP envy 15 (though I’m slightly put off by the streams of
> hotrunning poor customer support stories related to the consumer side of
> HP laptops).
>
> What I’d like to know is if anyone has any experience of the XPS 16
> (I’ll be upgrading it with an intel wifi card) or the envy and whether I
> stand a chance of getting Suse to work with such new laptops? I’d also
> welcome any recommendations (up to ~ £1200).
I don’t know exactly what the pound is worth these days but I bought a
Lenovo T-61 two years ago for $1700 CAN and have been very happy with it
running Opensuse 11.0, 11.1 and 11.2. Even the fingerprint reader works.
Bob.
It does pay in terms of time and effort to 1st research Linux compatibility before purchasing a laptop.
On sunday and then again last night, I helped a friend get openSUSE-11.2 running on their laptop with Intel 82845 graphics. It was possibly the most difficult Linux install I have encountered in years. The reason it was the most difficult is I hate difficult installs, so I research a lot before a purchase to ensure easy linux compatibility. That research pays me dividends in time saved, and my installs are often too simple.
However while this friend’s laptop is likely Linux compatible, if anything it is NOT easy compatibility.
In the end we have X running at 800x600 (on a laptop that is capable of over double that resolution) filling up the center 2/3 of the screen with massive black borders all around. Sax2 freezes when run on this hardware. The xorg autoprobe also freezes if no xorg.conf. We used the xorg.conf.install as the xorg.conf to get X to boot. This was especially painful for me as I am spoiled by easy installs, and I’m not currently in the best of health (which shortened my patience and snail speed thinking processes even slower than normal) 
. I’m hoping when I manage to dump this head-cold/fever and get back off of some upcoming business-trips/vacations I’ll be able to go in and hand edit their xorg.conf (its been over 10 years since I tried that). Normally for a forum request I would refuse to do such an edit, but one goes the extra distance for people one knows …
However with different hardware, very carefully researched and preselected in advance for easy compatibility, this sort of problem rarely occurs.
So I have to say starting a thread like this, is an EXCELLENT idea for discussing what works and what doesn’t.
May I also ask those who are successful in installing openSUSE on their laptops, update the openSUSE laptop HCL: HCL/Laptops - openSUSE
Sorry for the late reply. Yeah I tried Catalyst 9.11, 9.12 and 10.1, and also the radeon driver. Desktop effect or no, there is no windows resizing problem. But it seems to eat up a little bit more processor when resizing though.