Hardware Choices

Posted on Mon 01 December 2008 by alex in geek

It's getting to the point I'll have to make a decision soon on what I want out of a laptop. The current runners and riders are:

  • Dell Mini 9
  • Dell Mini 12
  • Acer Aspire One
  • Asus Eee 1000 PC

Unfortunately there is no current clear winner. Certainly I want SSD instead of a normal rotating hard drive. Intel Atom based is the way to go (for now) and Intel Graphics. I'd prefer 1GB of RAM to 512Mb (but often 1GB models are only available with Windows). The wireless complicates things as most of them need binary blobs to get the working, although hopefully all the major chipsets will have open source drivers soon. I would certainly *not* want anything that came with Windows pre-installed (and therefor paid for) because I'm never going to use it.