laptop recommendations

[lgu at pobox.com (Larry Underhill)]

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 17:09 +0000, Kalyan Vaidyanathan wrote:
> Hi,
>   I am looking to buy a laptop that can be reasonably used as a dev machine. 
>   I'm thinking atleast 1GB RAM and 80 GB hard disk.  Now questions:
> 1. Any recommended brands that are better and more resilient for dev use and 
> longer lasting battery life

I have been using a Thinkpad T41 for the past year and a half. Great
box, but my only complaint is wireless support. The built-in Atheros
chipset has dodgy driver support (last time I spent significant time
trying to get everything to work). Works lovely on my Linksys at home,
but problematic at your typical hotel/coffee shop access point. 

The uber-geeks at work have resorted to using a better supported PCMCIA
wireless card, so when I saw them give up, I did as well. Shame to see
those sleek little things with that ugly card sticking out of it
though...

--Larry