Okay, now that it's a given that I'm going to be getting a nice check from the Mozilla Foundation, my mind keeps going back to an encounter last July...
While I was up there for the Open Source Convention, I was staying with my parents. Shortly before I left, my eyes landed on an article in a popular computer magazine. What really caught my eyes about this particular laptop were two features: namely, that it was priced at $800, and that you could upgrade its RAM to 3 GB.
Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere!
I'm looking for a laptop, preferably one that I can seriously upgrade the RAM on. If it has a ceiling of 2.5GB or better, and is decently affordable, I'm very interested. I don't need the RAM now, but I do need the ability to upgrade it later.
(I will admit that 3GB RAM capacity is a bit much. But just to think of it...)
I don't need all the fancy commercial software. I've been doing tech for long enough that I can get products like OpenOffice and the like without paying a penny. The RAM is for building Mozilla. (I once heard someone say they had a 2GB RAMdisk that they built Mozilla on. That idea has me salivating.)
If it's not that expandable but gets decently close, I'm still interested. I don't care if you're selling it yourself or if you know where I can find it; I just don't want a bunch of someone else's cruft built up on it. I'll take used, as long as it's clean.
Basically, I want to find some good products that I can use to hack the lizard, the fox, the bird, and whatever other beasts you throw at me.
Posted by WeirdAl at October 6, 2004 6:15 PMToshiba Tecra M2, RAM can be upgraded to 3GB, my model (1.6GHz) comes with 512MB. But its no where near $800US
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/cmod.to?seg=HHO&coid=-26376&sel=0&rcid=-26367&ccid=1291021
Its pretty good for a linux user.
Posted by: sime at October 6, 2004 7:39 PMBasically, there is no better performing notebook than Alienware notebooks. Trust me on this one. They're VERY customizable so you can go with a really cheap model and upgrade it later, if and when you can. ;)
Posted by: MonsterTruck at October 6, 2004 10:43 PMNot anywhere near $800 I think (only have the danish price)
but Acer Ferrari 3200 ? upgrades to 2GB
Posted by: henrik lynggaard at October 6, 2004 11:52 PMAveratec 3200 Series (Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+) give the best price I know: $ 1000. It comes with 512 MB, but that's it. No upgrade. http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/3200series.htm
I have an Acer TM803LMi (Intel Centrino 1.6 GHz, 512 MB). It works fine on dual boot, and is upgradeable to 2 GB like most of the other Acer notebooks. I also examined an Asus M5643N having almost the same specs, - results satisfactory. But for the likes of these, you need to double your limit.
:( I'm not too surprised by what I'm hearing. Either from here or from my dad, who advises me to build up a six-month financial cushion before I buy a laptop at all.
His advice is frustrating in the extreme, but probably very wise. I'm going to rethink this, as a laptop seems out of range anyway for the immediate future.
Posted by: Alex Vincent at October 7, 2004 8:09 AMhttp://tinyurl.com/6vdaw
It can only go up to 1GB, but I love this little thing. Combined with http://tinyurl.com/lr8i its a perfect setup.
The debian distro that comes preinstalled is ok, but I am a gentoo fan so I wiped it and installed gentoo... works beautifully.
Posted by: justin at October 7, 2004 7:03 PM