I’ve been thinking a bit about laptops recently, not least because mrsBen wants to buy one. I have previously ranted about how people often choose something thats wrong just because it seems ‘cool’ or because they think that buying something that does something that they _might_ do means that they _will_ do it. But I made a new revelation recently.

People have often asked me what type of laptop I would recommend. My stock answer up to now is that I would recommend IBM if you can afford a Thinkpad (I very much like the T41 that they give me for my work ), or Toshiba if you can’t. And I always (always) recommend that people go for a 3 year warranty, preferably onsite.

Obviously, when people are asking the question, they are really meaning 2 things:

1. What would I buy if I was buying a laptop, and
2. What would I recommend that they buy.

And I’ve realised that there could well be 2 answers. When it comes down to it, the laptop I buy for myself is likely to be one from a company, such as NovaTech, that sells laptops that do not come preinstalled with Windows. I don’t want Windows, and I don’t want to pay for it. NovaTech gives me that option. Admittedly, some of the bigger vendors have marketted laptops with Linux preinstalled (HP, Dell and IBM all have at various times), but generally they are either single-spec, or only sold in the US.

The laptop I would recommend is still, as previously mentioned, likely to not be a laptop at all, unless the user can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be used in either a ‘truly’ mobile manner, or at very least in a multi-location way. In which case my answer may swing between my previous 2 answers. I would still, in all cases, recommend that people spend money on the hardware, rather than looking at ridiculous software packages while skimping on the important stuff. OpenOffice.org is still my office suite of choice, and I don’t see the point in spending extra on MS Office, when a huge percentage of users don’t really use any of the things that it has that OO.o doesn’t.

It does grate considerably when I discover that 1 of the wife’s specifications for her laptop is that it will run MS Word; but then, she can probably get away with it because I love her. It’s a shame that she will be abandoning her Ubuntu desktop after such a short time, but there’s not a lot I can say, really.

mrBen