I have a Toshiba Tecra laptop that was bought refurbished from Morgans
in 2009, when they still had a glass and concrete shop in New Oxford
Street. It came with Vista and was upgraded to XP dual booting with
Linux, and has been Linux-only since about 2011.

It was a fairly high spec for it's day and has been upgraded a few
times, but it has reached the stage where the battery is totally dead
and replacing it would feel like good money after bad ... so I'm
looking for something for the next 5-8 years.

I'm after something that weighs less than 2kg (preferably not more than
1.5kg) -- so probably 13.3" or 14" -- and has at least FHD display (the
more the merrier) with all-day battery life. Wired ethernet would be
nice, and an internal LTE modem would be good too.

I need a minimum of 8GB of RAM, preferably more, and at least 500GB of
storage; I'd be happy with a spinning rust disk -- speed is not that
important to me -- and I'm reluctant to pay what it (still!) costs for
a 1TB+ SSD though there seems little option, these days. It'd be nice
if the RAM and main storage were replaceable/upgradeable -- the disk especially, as I tend to upgrade an OS by installing a clean (and
larger) drive and doing a fresh install so that I have the old setup as
a backup.

I've looked at Dell XPS machines (attractive because you can buy it
configured with Ubuntu), the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon, a couple of HP
("Envy") models, and the 13" MacBook Pro. They're all expensive devices
but not outside my budgetary constraints ... I just don't know how to
choose between them ... and in absence of any actual physical shops
where you can go and actually poke at things I'm finding it difficult
to find out.

The Mac is the only one with 16:10 display, and I don't much like 16:9.
The Lenovo is the only one that can be had with an LTE modem. The HP is
the only one with wired ethernet.

Does anyone here have first-hand experience of any of these models and
if so can you tell me what you like and what you don't about them, and
how well they stand up to reasonable wear?

Finally -- is there any other make/model that might meet my
requirements that I haven't thought of?

Thanks.
--
Cheers,
Daniel.

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On Mon, 2 May 2016 16:22:43 +0100
Davey <davey@example.invalid> wrote:

Try:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops

Why would anyone want the hassle of importing a laptop?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Mon, 02 May 2016 15:18:45 +0100
Daniel James <daniel@me.invalid> wrote:

I have a Toshiba Tecra laptop that was bought refurbished from
Morgans in 2009, when they still had a glass and concrete shop in New
Oxford Street. It came with Vista and was upgraded to XP dual booting
with Linux, and has been Linux-only since about 2011.

It was a fairly high spec for it's day and has been upgraded a few
times, but it has reached the stage where the battery is totally dead
and replacing it would feel like good money after bad ... so I'm
looking for something for the next 5-8 years.

I'm after something that weighs less than 2kg (preferably not more
than 1.5kg) -- so probably 13.3" or 14" -- and has at least FHD
display (the more the merrier) with all-day battery life. Wired
ethernet would be nice, and an internal LTE modem would be good too.

I need a minimum of 8GB of RAM, preferably more, and at least 500GB
of storage; I'd be happy with a spinning rust disk -- speed is not
that important to me -- and I'm reluctant to pay what it (still!)
costs for a 1TB+ SSD though there seems little option, these days.
It'd be nice if the RAM and main storage were replaceable/upgradeable
-- the disk especially, as I tend to upgrade an OS by installing a
clean (and larger) drive and doing a fresh install so that I have the
old setup as a backup.

I've looked at Dell XPS machines (attractive because you can buy it configured with Ubuntu), the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon, a couple of HP
("Envy") models, and the 13" MacBook Pro. They're all expensive
devices but not outside my budgetary constraints ... I just don't
know how to choose between them ... and in absence of any actual
physical shops where you can go and actually poke at things I'm
finding it difficult to find out.

The Mac is the only one with 16:10 display, and I don't much like
16:9. The Lenovo is the only one that can be had with an LTE modem.
The HP is the only one with wired ethernet.

Does anyone here have first-hand experience of any of these models
and if so can you tell me what you like and what you don't about
them, and how well they stand up to reasonable wear?

Finally -- is there any other make/model that might meet my
requirements that I haven't thought of?

Thanks.

Try:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops

I have an RV511, that I am very happy with. It's now about three
and a half years old, I think.

--
Davey.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Mon, 2 May 2016 16:55:01 +0100
Rob Morley <nospam@ntlworld.com> wrote:

On Mon, 2 May 2016 16:22:43 +0100
Davey <davey@example.invalid> wrote:

Try:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops

Why would anyone want the hassle of importing a laptop?

That just happened to be the first website that came up with a Search,
I didn't know they had stopped selling them here. They sell tablets
with keyboards:

http://shop.samsung.com/uk/tabpro-s-bundles/

A shame they don't sell the laptops any more, I am very happy with
mine.

--
Davey.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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In article <ng7rc3$9s$1@n102.xanadu-bbs.net>, Davey wrote:

Try:

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops

I have an RV511, that I am very happy with.

Apart from the fact that Samsung don't seem to sell laptops over here
any more, I need more disk space than the 256GB that is all that
Samsung offer, and an option for 16GB would be nice.

<rant>
Samsung isn't a brand that I find inspires much trust. I have had a
Samsung phone and I have a Samsung tablet -- they're both very nicely
made but they're both abandonware, now, being about 4 years old and
unable to update Android past KitKat. They were both within the
statutory EU warranty period of 2 years when Lollipop came out and it's unforgivable that that upgrade wasn't offered (morally, if not
legally).

I also find that Samsung is a particularly lacking in Linux
friendliness ... I have a Samsung DVD writer in my main desktop PC, and
found that it needed a firmware upgrade to be able to read music CDs
correctly. I was somewhat unimpressed at having to remove the drive and
place it in a Windows PC to achieve the upgrade. A firmware upgrade
should be OS agnostic.
</rant>

Thanks for the thought, though. It's all grist to the mill.

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

In article <VA.00000b8c.00a5473b@me.invalid>, I wrote:

I'm after something that weighs less than 2kg (preferably not
more than 1.5kg) -- so probably 13.3" or 14" -- and has at least FHD
display (the more the merrier) with all-day battery life. Wired
ethernet would be nice, and an internal LTE modem would be good too.

I need a minimum of 8GB of RAM, preferably more, and at least 500GB
of storage; I'd be happy with a spinning rust disk -- speed is not
that important to me -- and I'm reluctant to pay what it (still!)
costs for a 1TB+ SSD though there seems little option, these days.
It'd be nice if the RAM and main storage were replaceable/upgradeable
-- the disk especially, as I tend to upgrade an OS by installing a
clean (and larger) drive and doing a fresh install so that I have
the old setup as a backup.

I was expecting a flood of useful advice, but usenet is sadly neglected
these days! Thanks to those who did respond.

I ended up getting a Lenovo Thinkpad T460p. A little bigger and heavier
than I ideally wanted but a shade under 1.7kg so not too bad -- makes my
old Toshiba look huge and clunky. It's a 16:9 display but most of my
other requirements are met. I couldn't get it without Windows, but even
with the "Microsoft Tax" it was within budget, especially as Lenovo
were running a discount offer over the bank holiday.

The keyboard quite good. Home and End are awkwardly placed, and the Ctrl
and Fn keys should perhaps have been swapped (and can be, in software,
but as the keys are different sizes you can't swap the key tops) but
apart from that it's lovely to type on, and the 2560x1440 display is
beautiful.

It's a Skylake machine and not many Linux distros are up-to-date enough
to support it -- Debian stable ran but didn't recognize most of the
hardware (I gather Debian Testing does, with just one or two glitches)
-- but Ubuntu (with Mate) is running nicely. I avoided the models with
hybrid graphics which may be just as well.

Just thought I should report back.
--
Cheers,
Daniel.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sat, 11 Jun 2016 13:51:40 +0100
Daniel James <daniel@me.invalid> wrote:

I was expecting a flood of useful advice, but usenet is sadly
neglected these days! Thanks to those who did respond.

You picked the wrong bit of Usenet - uk.comp.homebuilt has become the general-purpose computing group.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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In article <20160611143627.28f96dd3@ntlworld.com>, Rob Morley wrote:

You picked the wrong bit of Usenet - uk.comp.homebuilt has become the general-purpose computing group.

Yeah, I know ... but my query would technically have been off-topic,
there, and I do see many of the same names cropping here from time to
time.

It's a sad thing when one faces a choice between committing a breach of netiquette and not getting an answer ...

--
Cheers,
Daniel.
(off topic after all)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Sun, 12 Jun 2016 18:27:07 +0100
Daniel James <daniel@me.invalid> wrote:

It's a sad thing when one faces a choice between committing a breach
of netiquette and not getting an answer ...

Worry about that when someone (whose opinion you value) complains about
that, not before. It is easier to ask forgiveness ...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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