Linux Laptop

It's a brickbook.

It uses DDR2, and an old CPU - clockspeed isn't the be-all-end-all, what often matters more is the individual model, cache, amount of power it uses, that sort of thing. Just for example, I have a 3.33GHz celeron D in one of my old rigs, and it would get stomped into the ground by..... uhhh... an iPhone?
It's about what the processor does in every cycle, balanced against the speed of the cycles.

I assume it's maximum RAM is lower, because it's DDR2 and an older chipset - you can't upgrade it as far.

It has onboard graphics - I honestly don't know how many laptops have dedicated graphics now (as I don't have the money for new shit), if any, but what this means is that you're sharing your RAM and CPU with a half-assed low-power graphics chip that steals resources as it needs from everything else - your actual available RAM will be 2.xGB (and, you generally want to allocate all you can for graphics in the BIOS, to make it livable).

You'll need to use, if possible, an ATI driver, and this says there's no 2d acceleration, probably meaning you have no choice in the matter and it will suck if you don't (and maybe even if you do), because the generic linux driver won't know the funky ins and outs of how the integrated graphics chip bubblegum n' duct tapes everything together. Graphics are bad enough in linux, but integrated graphics absolutely suck, they often never run truly properly.

It's got a case like a boat anchor, and no webcam, if that bothers you - on the bright side, it means less tape on your computer when you're not using the webcam. As you say, it's got old wireless.

Toshiba makes lowest common denominator computers - they're not truly awful like acer or something, but they're cheap and far from leading edge, they're bulky, etc.

I'm currently on a newer satellite - it's got DDR3, and I have 6GB in it, which works out to like 5.3GB with the sucky integrated graphics. It's running a (somewhat hacked up) ubuntu install - I plan to throw debian on it, but as I recall I had problems last time I tried that, it wouldn't boot from a debian disk or wanted an ACPI kernel option to do it or something stupid like that. It's somewhat generically paired hardware and something will work on it, but not necessarily work well. Even though on paper it's got plenty of power and a shit-ton of ram for linux, it's sluggish and horrible to use, the graphics driver doesn't work very well and I can't run very much at once, windows go unresponsive when they shouldn't and hang for a little while, which I'm pretty sure is the shitty graphics.... simple shit that should just work is a chore, you learn to deal with a delay in your typing and not even look at the screen so it doesn't scramble your brains... it struggles badly to run original WoW (circa 05) in WINE, something that should not be hard or any sort of big deal, it's totally unplayable.

To a degree, this is just the linux life - I'm using it now and do for hours every day, it works, it was free, the operating system was free, if it was that bad I'd put windows 7 on it (it came with it and, as such, has the code and all), or figure something else out - but it does feel like a fucking pentium 4 - to a degree this is also the fault of linux, trying waaaaayyyyy too hard to do the windows game and use every bit of resource they can, instead of keeping it simple and fast for the average joe's computer.

Anyway, all that combined, assuming the battery is good and everything, $35 would probably be fair, if it's really in excellent condition.

 

i use the amd catalyst drivers and it's not bad at all. shittier drivers can take some tinkering and experimentation to get to be acceptable or trying different drivers and configurations.

no page tearing with the amd catalyst drivers, antialiasing, anisotropic filtering and such works well too in Kubuntu, 3D stuff renders just fine. I have mint on this particular laptop and also have the catalyst drivers.

my shittier laptop has xubuntu with xfce, it has a shitty graphics chip, and im not sure exactly what it is. the graphics on it are a little bit shittier cuz i haven't found (or really looked for) the optimal configuration w/ drivers for it. i suspect the encryption overhead might be to blame, it only has a relatively weak i3 chip, 2 gig of ram and no swap partition because i didn't want any memory pages being swapped out where they would be unencrypted and possibly could be recovered easily by inspecting the raw disk blocks. the entire filesystem is encrypted so i guess i could create a file within this and mount it as swap then the kernel could use it but i'd imagine the encryption overhead would mean a huge performance penalty when page swapping occurs.

i could write a shutdown script to zero fill the swap partition on shutdown but it wouln't be that fast, and wouldn't be ideal in some kind of emergency situation, where someone came right upon me and i didn't have time to let the script finish. the setup i have all i'd have to do is to force the machine to power off, before they can get the laptop from me.

 

very good point. I even realized as I read up more the extent to which clock speed is not necessarily a good measure of performance.

Typical computer specs. list CPU clockspeed, ram, and HD, maybe a few other features, and price. In the absence of other info, it's easy to get sucked into judging machines by these.

I wish that instead of these specs. they listed time in seconds to complete certain tasks under standardized conditions. I think that some magazines have their own in-house benchmarks, but I wish there was a universal set.

I'm not so much concerned about things like case size and weight. I'll mostly use the laptop on a desktop. I like the idea of having a laptop mostly because I like having the mobility option available.

Yeah, the webcam seems more like a privacy/security threat than an asset.

As far as DDR2 vs DDR3, this seems to be mostly an issue of compatibility. So DDR3 is faster, but allegedly for most programs, ram will not be a limiting factor.

I sometimes use spreadsheets with lots of calculations though, which can eat up memory.


So email, web surf, spreadsheets with good security/privacy. An older machine may be ok for this. I suppose if flash-plugins no longer support the hardware, I could be forced to upgrade. On the other hand, I might be able to use youtube dl and avoid the general vulnerabilities of flash


Dell, HP, and Toshiba are the brands I'm encountering most frequently as I search. With the same specs, should I prefer Dell or HP?

I'm not sure if I could talk this guy down to $35 bucks. I'm not sure that would be fair, even if I could.

So would this machine really be blown away by, for example,

an HP 14-Z040 wm Steam http://www.notebookocean.com/hp-stream-14-z040wm-specs/ retailing at $300 (and which wouldn't have a DVD-RW and has a smaller display)

or by a Toshiba Satin Gold Satellite Radius also retailing for $300 (also no dvd-rw and a much smaller screen) ?

 

Tails would be overkill certainly, I'm not really considering that given the comments that have been made on this thread so far.

In principle I might stick to a windows machine if running linux seems like too much of a hassle.

Still, in addition to practical issues, feeling like my machine is vulnerable to malware and data collection gets to me.

 

yeah, i don't like having a camera pointed at my face at all times either. i usually place a small peice of post-it note over the camera if it's not in use

 

^ I think that a locking slider or a cap should be included

 

For dell vs HP, I don't know - I haven't touched newer ones, but HP has always, in my experience, made really plane-jane computers with no frills, but that are really solidly built and reliable - dell is reasonably reliable, but somewhat less sturdy usually - dell does have a ubuntu option (as far as I know) and ships plenty of computers with no windows at all, with linux pre-installed and tailor-made with the right drivers and everything just like if it came with windows - so if you're buying new, dell is a big company that's not some hole-in-the-wall that does preloaded linux - but there might be more ethical companies that do just as good a job, just saying, for super mainstream, that's cool about dell.

As for the CPU's, there's sites that benchmark them, tomshardware is one that I remember, if they're still around. Of course real world performance varies based not only on what you're doing, but the computer it's in (again, is it having to deal with integrated graphics, etc), and how well suited your OS is to it.


Skip, there's pretty linux nowadays - ubuntu was really bland for a while, but in retrospect, I loved 10.04, it was the last bland one but not that bland, but still really fast and worked really well on my computer - I really have not liked their unity gui implementation - debian has a much prettier smoother implementation, ime. The thing is that you can make linux pretty, but it just works so much worse on so many people's computers, when it's got a bunch of shiny stuff... I like shinies as much as anyone, but I'll take lightening fast over shiny.

Of course, if it's just too shiny and not fast enough, you can install a different desktop environment, like xfce4 - I just realized, I should probably be using that, I'd probably like this machine a lot better - brb in 10 minutes....

 

cap is a good idea, the switch it would depend on how it was implemented. if the switch just flipped a bit from a 0 to a 1 to mark the device as in a "locked" state it could still be possible that an attacker could update the value and override the switch.

someone tried to convince me once that the reason so many devices come with cameras built in now is so that the cops have an easy way to conduct surveillance on everyone at all times. i'm not THAT paranoid, but you never know i guess.

 

Well wouldn't ya know it, I already had it installed, totally forgot - holy shit, this is snappy now.

By the way ez, about yahoo standing up to the government, everyone has their fee for when they have to get data for the government, it happens a lot even legitimately and with warrants - what yahoo fought on was when one of the NSA programs (prizm, i think) demanded access to everyone's email, warrant-free, with a 250k daily fine for noncompliance - yahoo held them off 2 days, despite the fact that it was all gagged and secret and they couldn't even get publicity or any real legal foothold to fight back - I don't know if they ended up paying the fine, but I know they resisted the initial request. And, in the thread with the addict, when you were talking about how I'm not being bad to people for their own sake - I totally agree, I was not doing anything wrong to her, I think you read my posts with a connotation that I didn't mean - being harsh is okay and sometimes necessary, and if you're talking about overcoming flaws, someone submitting a list of flaws along with a list of rationalizations requires that the rationalizations be destroyed first, before you can fix the flaws - otherwise, you're offering solutions that are not as gentle as their rationalizations, and they'll just default to the rationalizations, even if they know it's a cop-out.

.....been meaning to hunt those threads down and explain that for days, figured if I didn't say it I'd forget it.

I have an older laptop with a slider on it's webcam - I would probably be using it for something (it's got a neat fingerprint reader, which works with linux, too) but linux can't sleep it more than once, after the first sleep/wake cycle you have to reboot to get it to go to sleep again, so being a laptop, the battery continuously drains if you carry it around.... never got the fix to work, I should get back on it, it's probably resolved by now, I recall it just being an intermediate solution in how the kernel did something that was causing the problem.

 

my guess is that the main reason why cams are so popular these days is because of selfies and skype.

it's not so much that the cams are there to spy on you, but rather, because the cams are there, there's a vulnerability. in most cases, no one is going to bother taking over your cam, but i'm sure if some one with hacker skills was curious/unethical enough, they would probably do it.

 

subjects for other threads

Dell E5420 by any chance?

 

i typed a big thing earlier, and then my windows vista virtual machine decided that it needs to restart to finish installing updates whithout even asking first and i was pissed cuz it was a lot.

btw .. i'll show you a good reason to run windows vista in a virual machine i do like vista tho, for the fact that it has a lower resource footprint than more recent additions like win7 and win8.x which don't seem to offer a whole lot more than windows vista except prettier graphics.



the first computer my family bought that actually had a GUI was a windows 95 machine, it was from this machine that we learned that you should save your work often, that way when windows BSODs you'll only lose a little and not everything i don't think i've seen win7/8.x BSOD except once, if i remember correctly they no longer include a stack trace, probably because people think it looks scary

these days i might leave a text editor open for days without saving, and be okay unless a powerfailure comes along. ironically, i remember one time about 2 months ago where i wanted to destroy things, because my uninterruptible power supply which is supposed to protect me from power failure itself failed, there was no power failure the thing just croaked and started beeping indicating it had issues and lost everything that had been on the screen.

i do kinda like that shade of blue tho, windows BSOD blue ... it's a pretty color

 

because it comes with slut roulet?

I just remember people complaining about vista a lot. Maybe there were problems early on that got fixed? Maybe people just complain about anything new?

 

i remember people complaining about vista because of things like new way it implemented memory management (seeming to use as much memory as it can) which is actually supposed to improve performance. iirc, vista was the first microsoft OS to implement UAC (user account control) which is a good thing for security.

winXP was good, i don't think it had UAC tho and wouldn't recommend it MS no longer releases updates, so any new exploits discovered will effectively be 0-day exploits forever.

it really kinda gets to me tho, how many people have machines infected with all kinds of bullshit and only really notice or care when it ceases to function. as if getting viruses was just a normal thing. the point of most "viruses" and malware is not to "fuck ur shit up" but to do other devious things with your machine like generating web traffic or proviing personal information. i'm sure the malware makers would rather that it goes undetected, performance issues are a side effect

 

i often wonder if anti-virus/malware software makes its money by collecting data. the virus/malware removal part is just about getting rid of competitors

 

the virus removal is a reason for people to spend more money ...

 

I use KUbuntu. Ubuntu with KDE.