What does a Hacker look for in a new laptop | Hacker News Reader

What does a Hacker look for in a new laptop

9 pointsyearsinrock36 comments

I have fairly powerful Desktop,running all different types of os like a charm,I am currently in the third year of my CS Engg., and I wanted to buy a laptop(dont know y ,just felt that i wanted one).So what is a coder/hacker like h/w configuration like( i recently started learning asp.net and already know c/c++ )Is a intel celeron m processor enough for coding needs and is portability a issue (as u get in an asus eee pc)

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It really comes down to the features you actually need or desire.

Take a hard look at your workflow and usage scenarios:

Do you plan on running a lot of stuff at once? Visual Studio or Eclipse use a lot of resources, you'll probably want to spend a bit on a better CPU and more RAM.

If you don't tax computers very heavily, you might be better served spending on a faster disk and skipping the extra RAM. I had a computer with 1G of RAM that I upgraded to 2G. I actually preferred it with 1G because I rarely use 512MB, and I suspend/resume all of the time. Double the RAM doubled my suspend time, and that's kind of annoying.

Consider your budget. Is this a short term discretionary spend or a long term investment for you? I believe that it's better to buy current generation, mid-high grade parts for some key pieces, electing to forego trendy cutting-edge features, if you're planning on holding on to this for a while. If this is a cheap impulse buy, skip the specs and buy the one with the neat bells and buzzers.

How hard are you on your equipment? If you have peers with laptops, especially some older or more used ones, look at the build quality and the things that are going wrong with them. Some laptop manufacturers (HP/Compaq) do stupid things like making the power cable connector L shaped, which makes the cord into a lever when the cable is kicked. This lever prys on the connector's soldering to the motherboard and trashes the computer. Some manufacturers (Dell) make computers that creak and crack and sag as they age. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) make the laptop lid position switch cheap and unreliable, which makes the LCD flicker when the screen is open. Some manufacturers (IBM / Lenovo) make computers that are tough and reliable but are so ugly you wish they'd die so you can get something else. Some manufacturers (Apple) make computers with such fiddly fit and finish that any service, even by a trained professional, will cause the seams and gaps to not be perfect anymore, which will annoy you because you paid a premium for all of that fit and finish.

For myself I prefer full processors (no Celerons), discrete graphics cards (perhaps passing on the current nVidias that are all failing right now), sufficient (but not more than that) RAM, the fastest hard drives I can afford, and the highest resolution screens available (1900x1200, particularly in a 15", is what I prefer). With this formula you generally have decent parts for things you don't normally upgrade (CPU), and you don't blow your budget on things that can be upgraded later for less (max RAM, larger capacity HD).

Long battery life, light weight, and most important: fast wakeup and sleep when I close the lid! This is the most important feature to me. I want to open it up, quick jot something down or check something and then close it again. If it locks up or churns for 10 minutes before I can use it, its a non starter. This has so far kept me on Macs.

"This is the most important feature to me."

I agree with this, with the caveat that actually more important is reliability. Our company bought a few Lenovo T60Ps - with how great the T43P had performed, we thought it would be T43P++. Unfortunately the wireless cards were VERY flaky. :(

So, I want: reliability so I don't have to futz with wireless and other functionality - and then instant on and off. "Elastic laptop"

Excellent point. Lucky for me, I haven't ended up with a flaky mac yet so its not on my radar, but I'd certainly have to say that ultra reliable networking, keyboard, pointer and USB would be a must.

It doesn't matter how fast your computer wakes up from sleep if it takes 10 minutes of fiddling to get it back on the network.

If the biggest caveat is a wireless card, you can probably replace it.

I have a Thinkpad T41, which has been great except the OpenBSD driver for the included wireless card was incomplete (due to being reverse-engineered). It was only about $15 to replace it with a Ralink card; Ralink happily provided full tech specs to the BSD devs, and the card works quite well.

>> Long battery life >> Light weight >> Fast wakeup and sleep

Only thing I'd add is "small". The market may be tilting towards larger computers, but I wouldn't get anything larger than a 13.3 inch computer at this point. 13-inches hits the sweet spot in terms of size and usability. Anything small doesn't feel like a real computer. Anything larger is awkward to use in contained spaces like on airline seats.

I agree. I do most of my work with my desktop anyway, so if I'm going to buy a new laptop I will make sure that it is portable

I once bought a 15.4" heavy Dell laptop, but I ended up not using it because I couldn't be bothered to drag it around. Now the laptop is 100% stationary since it given to my mother to browse the web.

My preference here is to not have the machine sleep at all when it's closed. I do more sysadmin type work than local development type work, and having TCP (SSH) sessions end every time you close the lid would drive me bananas. I would have ruined several laptops in the last few months as our 90 pound great dane puppy has run at me while I was sitting in my chair hacking away.

MacBooks (and MBPs) don't make this easy, which (unfortunately) has kept me on PCs. I've mitigated the ten minutes of BS thing by keeping my machines clean, with an agressive attitude toward junkware, and setting the power button to suspend the computer to disk.

I've made the "i'm using you" / "i'm done using you, good night" command an explicit step this way, but after adapting it's actually kind of nice (even faster than mac sleep/wake) and lets you keep your music and remote terminals alive, which can be convenient at times.

I suspend my desktop nightly (which saves about $100/year).

I have SSH sessions to 6 machines: they just run while:; do ssh -t hostname screen -dR. After a resume, a "killall ssh" kills the broken connections and starts a new one which will bring up exactly the same terminal as before, due to screen.

Depending on how long you suspend for the SSH sessions might still work (assuming you get the same IP address, and there's no NAT with short timeouts, and there's no SSH timeout configured).

If it were me I wouldn't go with a Celeron; for performance and cache reasons the Pentium M is the wiser decision. Maybe if you're preferring wattage and battery versus overall performance you'd go with Celeron. I run IDE's, profiling and debuggers galore so I need what the Centrino offers.

All great points mentioned here. Lightweight; you can get real light these days without being a DR. I love widescreen ever since I bought my new Thinkpad T61p and the poor displays on the Thinkpads are a thing of the past. I highly disagree that Thinkpads are ugly - they're made for efficiency and professionalism, not for show. Linux; my machine came with SLED of which I partitioned for my love of Ubuntu - gotta have Linux for kernel hacking and that obsessive need for ultimate control of your OS.

All that said, I'm a power user and by that I literally mean I handle my laptop ruggedly(and I'm sincerely not a klutz). For this reason I need a Thinkpad for always on the go and durable performance. They take a beating and their customer service(warranty related) is the best in the business. Had many other brands that crapped out after six to eight months on average - Thinkpads last on average three years before I call in for warranty service(high resale value). My T61p is both lightweight, high performance, widescreen, and allows up to 4 GB of RAM, rugged and goes with me everywhere while taking bumps and bruises along the way. Need a new keyboard because your hackin skillz have worn away the home row, space bar and number row? Call in a service ticket and get a keyboard shipped out and arrived to your door in less than two days(Bigtime priority).

Once you go Thinkpad, you never go back, at least for me anyways.

I used to think so... and I was (like you) thinking that my (6.77 pounds) T61 was "lightweight". I finaly replaced it by a Portégé R500 (my first non-Thinkpad laptop in years). Less screen real estate (12"1), obviously not as rugged and sturdy, but I could pack no less than four of those R500 in my bag, and it would still be lighter than my old Thinkpad! Get used to it: Thinkpads (most of them anyway) are really heavy by today standards.

Your requirements are obviously different than mine. And I'm not sure where you got yours, but my Thinkpad runs at about 5-5.5 lbs... far from close to seven. By your response, it appears you misread my requirements. I agree it's not the lightest, but maybe I should have said it is a dream compared to my previous T43 which feels more like a weighted brick. But emphasis in my post was on ruggedness... which I'll take any day over weight. In that bag of four Portege's or one Protege and whatever else, I'm more concerned with picking up that laptop where I left off - in top condition, which is tough to say when you got a bag stuffed and who knows what could happen to it in transit. Thinkpads have good investment and therefore resale value and I'm not looking for laptops that are fancy on the shell, not coming close to the levels in durability that a Thinkpad does.

My main point was that the ruggedness and superior build quality of Thinkpads used to have limited drawbacks: they were at worst 10 to 20% heavier than alternatives (and sometimes even lighter, like the 560 around 1995). Not so anymore, especially in the smaller and lighter models: the X200 (and X300) are 120% (and 70%) heavier than a R500. That's why I finally reassessed my longstanding commitments to Thinkpads. But you are right to point that it may be less of an issue for the T series than for the X series: I would probably have stuck to Thinkpads had I been looking for a 15+ inches screen.

Most people I give PC buying advice to really don't think like I do -- either they want a $400 computer, or they want some $2500 thing with some gimmick feature set (custom color lid? who cares? lightscribe blu-ray burner? do that at home! Vista turbo-memory? Why?). For this reason I sometimes over-discount my own opinions about them when I'm advising others.

I personally agree about Thinkpads not being ugly (when I made that comment I was referring to my wife's perception of them initially -- now she's a T61p WUXGA convert as well).

I also agree about Thinkpad reliability, but I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, and everyone's mileage varies.

I disagree about the T series weight. The T grew to fill the void left by the discontinued ~7 pound A series. Yes it's lighter but I feel sorry for any floor it might land on... but the computer will most likely survive.

I fancy myself a power / heavy professional user as well: I have a very low tolerance for hardware related BS. I run minimalist installs of the OS of my choice (XP at the moment). I expect to be able to throw my computer around (while off -- I'm not a sadist) and not scuff or break anything. I disable or order machines without gimmick features (Bluetooth is disabled on my T60p, I got one without the fingerprint reader), and I don't use the full (software-integrated) versions of drivers for anything I don't have to.

With this recipe, my Thinkpads have been very faithful to me over the last ~10 years, and Lenovo's going to have to really screw it up to lose me as a customer.

Depending on what you're looking for I'd say that IBM/Lenovo is ahead of even Apple on build quality. In my opinion Apple pushes too hard on fine design (fine lines and edges, thin case designs) where the Thinkpad team designs their machines to take abuse first and foremost.

If you're the type of person who values these properties I believe a Thinkpad should be on your short list.

> custom color lid? who cares?

I care. I have to use the machine(s) every single day, sometimes for hours on end. If it's ugly, I don't want to look at it. Same goes for accessories. It's impossible to find a half decent non-black or pink womens laptop bag (I believe there's a special and separate level of hell just for the color pink, that's how much I hate it). I just stick with nondescript messenger bags, which don't always fit the occasion but oh well.

My black MacBook has an engraved lid (http://flickr.com/photos/chix0r/2490375769/). The biggest benefit is that it sticks out like a sore thumb so I know it's mine, since so many people don't do anything to their MacBooks after getting one. Very convenient when you're in a sea of Apple laptops..which used to happen to me at WWDC but now also happens at pretty much any tech conference nowadays.

It also makes a great conversation starter with lots of people who are very tempted to touch it..everywhere from airport security waiting lines to the apple store and all.

I would get one of the smallest models I could. I'd also make sure it runs linux. use desktops for power that's what they are good at, notebooks should be portable, meaning comfortable to carry around in a bag for a while. Light as you can get.

About the only thing I would invest in is at least 1G of ram, maybe even 2G. laptops tend to ship with slower hard drives so if you start swapping you are really going to have problems. maybe benchmark your average ram usage on the desktop.

I've found that processor speed isn't as important as most people think, go light you'll be fine, this isn't a server.

last note. I regret buying a desktop replacement laptop.

edit: when I say make sure it runs linux I mean make sure that it's hardware is compatible with a linux install. That same hardware will work good with windows, and gives you freedom of choice later. Or you can just get linux now because linux rules.

this is why i love my macbook air so much..

If you're not doing anything too intensive and you can afford it, it's easily one of the most enjoyable computers I've ever used. Agreed.

Light as you can get AND linux friendly: that's exactly what I was looking for. I am now the very happy owner of a sub-2 pounds, Ubuntu certified, 12.1" laptop for 6 month, and that the best notebook choice I ever made. Right choice for me, but I am only on the road 5 to 6 days a month, so your mileage may vary if you are really a nomad worker.

I'm thinking of picking up something similar for traveling. What model are you using?

I find one of the most important things is screen space. And I don't mean a gigantic 17" screen; I mean DPI. I have a 15.4" laptop with a 1680x1050 screen; this gives me room to work. I've seen laptops the same size with 1280x800 screens; I don't know how anyone could do much of anything on those.

Don't get anything too heavy. Mine's just over 6 pounds, and that's already pushing it.

Finally, don't worry about hard disk space; if you need lots, just grab an external drive; they're cheap these days.

I use a 15.4" Dell Latitude D830 @ 1920x1200 and wouldn't trade it for any other laptop made. I'd say 1920x1200 is about my limit for a 15" LCD, but if anyone makes a 17" laptop that goes higher I'll be first in line. It's amazed me for years how under appreciated the value of high resolution is.

I had one of those screens, and I thought I would love it, but it ended up causing too much eye strain. Major headaches! Now I prefer small screens with moderate DPI on the go, and using a large external LCD when possible.

Right now I'm using a 37" 1080P LCD as my home monitor and an X60 as my laptop. I use the LCD to keep various communication tools open and the large LCD for coding/reading.

I'm using the same laptop + external monitor setup, but I'd actually like to use two external monitors. For me, screen space and RAM are the two important factors.

For me, the killer feature is battery life. I used to have a macbook pro, but I'd get ~3 hours batter life at best (and only 2 hours, when doing heavy work).

I sold it, and bought a thinkpad x60, and get over 6 hours of battery life (4-5 hours under heavy load). I love that I can basically use it all day without worrying about battery.

Pretty much any machine has a fast enough cpu for the kind of work I do - ram seems to be the big bottleneck now. (virtualization + firefox + emacs + python + sbcl + ... all take their toll).

Most important: minimum 30 day return policy, no restocking fee if poss. You need to take the laptop to coffee shops, office, home, train, see what's annoying, like glossy screens may make you crazy. So i recommend Amazon, Costco, Target.com for returns policy

things that can render a laptop unusable:

- poor display, keyboard, or wireless card; excess fan noise or heat.

nice to have: fast Core 2 Duo, minimum 2G RAM, if you're doing lots of compiles, spidering (DOM tree extraction), database indexing, anyting that pegs CPU's for more than a couple minutes.

like everybody else, my first choices would be macbook or Macbook pro/ Vmware fusion/ Windows XP and ubuntu, or thinkpad with XP/grub/ubuntu (i don't think you can buy them with XP pre-loaded anymore). Toshiba, Dell, HP still sell XP pre-loaded (the "downgrade option") Macbook is only model < $1800 that has DVI out, which makes a big difference

Toshiba satellites aren't bad, mine's been reliable for 3 years. Read the amazon reviews.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268438

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182

An Apple logo.

(Joking aside, I refuse to work on anything else any more, life's too short to fight your OS)

If you work much, you want a high display resolution. However, the laptop still has to be small, so there will be a compromise. Personally, I would go for something like 1280*768 on 13", which is both small and possible to work with.

The other thing you really want is silence. And battery life.

Even if you code a lot, CPU speed is rather irrelevant. Any Core2Duo will do (dual core and 64Bit are great to have). But RAM, you can't have enough -- and since it is cheap at the moment, don't bother and directly upgrade to 4G.

For me, this is a MacBook, but there are plenty of alternatives. For example, the FSC Lifebook series is really great. If possible, look for those business-offerings. They tend to use a little older but more reliable hardware, which can really save your day and will most certainly enable you to run linux.

Personally, a Macbook Pro. I want a laptop to be fast to boot, reliable and nice to work on. Technically OSX is what does all this, but you asked which laptop you should buy, and you either get a Windows Vista or OSX machine. (not to mention getting a Windows machine and booting some flavor of linux, or creating a hackintosh, if thats what you want to do)

Spec wise, I'm running on a Macbook Pro 2006 model with a Core Duo 1.86Ghz processor and 2GB of ram, and I'm doing great. I'm sure one of the latest models with a C2D 2.4GHz CPU would be a bit faster, but I don't do anything too intensive (light photoshop is probably the limit of my number crunching apps). So pretty much anything you buy today (except the ultra-budget machines, of course) will suit you for your needs. Just make sure you have a nice amount of ram! :)

Purchased an Eee 1000H and got it up and running today.

Blew away the default XP install for Heron. Had to fidget with some packages and the kernel a little to get it all going smoothly. Not too bad.

What sold me on it was the ergonomics (keyboard's perfectly usable, 10.2" screen) and the portability (5 hours of battery with continuous use; I let it sleep when I wasn't using it and went all day on a single charge).

The goal was to have the laptop on me at all times so I can get work done anywhere.

High DPI, lightweight (I can always plug it into an external monitor if I need the real estate, so 13" monitor at most), large disk (for portability of all my files - I have a fileserver at home and use offline files), long battery life.

If you want to code, don't get an Eee PC.

For general hacking, processor speed these days doesn't seem to be an issue...

wat abt celeron m processor can it run visual studio?

if it's 1.5Ghz or more then you'll have no problems. Unless you are doing a lot at once you can probably get away with 1Ghz and maybe less. Ram is killer and remember this is mobile not your primary coding box.

Thanks -- I forgot to mention RAM. I use anything with less than 2gb now, 3gb preferred.

since you have a desktop, get decent average laptop(dual core, 2gb ram, big HDD, internal cd/dvd-rw-unless you don't mind lugging an external one, wireless card, and comfy keyboard).I tried coding in eeepc 7" screen and it didn't get me far. I used 12" asus ultraportable running linux for years and they are good and has pretty solid build. Unless you're getting a linux certified one or buying from a linux-laptop vendor, chances are some features won't work. I just recently switched to 17" mbp because my coding activity has demanded it (more horsepower and screen real estate), but keeping my 12" for fun hacking and cracking. Both lappies has one thing that's very important for coders: NICE keyboard. That being said, choosing a personal laptop is like choosing a GF/BF: it's personal, only you know your coding habit and which feature is the most important for you.

A MacBook Pro :)

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