• Comment on how to approach the purchase decision
• List what features are important and what are overrated
• Discuss these features in detail
• Make a final recommendation

This guide is for

• Students who are managing the laptop deal on behalf of the incoming batch
• Students who are buying a laptop through this bulk deal
• Students who are buying a laptop just before joining the institute

A laptop will be used mostly for your projects and assignments (Web browsing and Office), communication (email, chat) and entertainment (movies/sitcoms, gaming). No heavy-duty software development/Photoshop work.

The Purchase Decision – Price

Buy an high-end laptop (in a bulk deal) instead of a mid-range one. No one does this. Unfortunately, year after year students opt for cheap laptops instead. They draw a psychological line at Rs. 60000. Spending about Rs. 15000 more on a laptop will give you a dramatically better laptop, and a dramatically better experience over two years. It will also be a sophisticated high-end personal laptop for 2-3 years after B-school. Relative to the total size of your loan (~6-8 Lakh), Rs.15000 is a small amount. So do the smart thing, spend that much more and get a better laptop.

Your vendor will also be willing to sell you a high-end laptop at a good discount. For one, such laptops are already sold in bulk to companies for their higher-level executives, so their actual sales price is much below the stated retail pricen. Two, the vendor gets a higher total deal size (in Rupees) as well as earns a better margin.

As for the “Company baad mein laptop deti hi hai” argument, the reality is that with very few exceptions, post-MBA companies buy the same mid-range laptops for new joinees that students do. Do yourself a favor and get a Good Laptop in B-school. Such laptops have rather high retail prices, and a bulk deal is your best opportunity to own a high-end machine at a bargain price.

The Purchase Decision – Features

Important Features
Weight and Screen resolution are what push the price of a laptop up. They are also what will make the biggest difference to your laptop experience.

• Weight (you’ll be lugging around your laptop during summers too, remember)
• Screen size and resolution (sharper displays, more screen area, more lines of text) (more)
• USB Ports (more)
• Microphone (more)

Overrated Features

• Price (see above)
• Widescreen monitors
• Processor
• Battery capacity (more)
• Hard disk (more)
• Video card (more)
• RAM (more)
• Webcam

How the ideal B-school laptop will look

• Rs. 75000 – Rs. 80000
• 2 kg weight
• 14″ non-widescreen monitor
• On-board video card with shared memory
• 80 GB hard disk
• 1.5 GB RAM
• 2 USB ports
• 6-cell Li-ion battery

Recommendation

The Lenovo T-series (currently the T61) is *the* best 14? Windows-based laptop on the market. Superb build quality, great ergonomics, best-in-class keyboard, high native resolution, light weight and plenty of processing muscle. A T-series laptop will be a bargain at Rs. 75K and won’t be obsolete for 4-5 years at least.

More about Features

Screen Size and Weight
Important! Opt for a 14″ (14 inch) laptop screen over a 15″ one. There is a noticable difference in weight. This matters because your laptop will do some serious traveling around the campus. Usually, both 14″ and 15″ screens have the same native resolution (see below), so a larger size screen will only add weight without the benefit of extra screen space. Widescreen monitors mean extra screen area but also more weight, so you’re better off without a widescreen. Note: The screen size is measured along the diagonal:

Screen Resolution

Important! Resolution is the number of pixels you can see on your screen; a higher resolution means larger screen area. This is important – you can see more lines of text (in Word), more cells (in Excel), and sharper visuals (while watching movies or gaming). A high-resolution screen can dramatically improve your laptop experience.

Common 14″ or 15″ CRT desktop monitors are capable of a resolution of 1024 pixels (horizontally) and 768 pixels (vertically), denoted as 1024×768. Low-end 14″ laptops are also capable of 1024×768. Ask for a laptop screen that does better – a resolution of 1280×1024 on a 14″ screen is very good.

Video Card and Graphics
Dedicated video card or onboard? Separate video memory or shared? For all your needs, an onboard card will be more than powerful enough. A dedicated card is a needless expense. Just make sure you have enough system RAM (see below) (back).

RAM
You can never have too much RAM. 1GB – 1.5GB is enough for most tasks. A few of you will plan to use your laptop beyond B-school; buy another 1GB chip (ask for a student discount) and fit it into your machine’s expansion slot. Note: I went through B-school with a 4-year-old 14″ IBM Thinkpad with 768MB RAM and faced no problems. It is still my primary machine. (back)

Hard Disk Capacity
80GB should be enough. In my post on Essential College Gear, I recommended buying a high-capacity external hard disk. Keep your photos, movies, videos and other large files on that disk. You will watch several movies during B-school. In fact, a ton of them. Download them from the campus server, watch them, delete them. Copy your favorite ones to your external disk. You really don’t need 100+ GB hard disks. Needless expense. (back)

Battery capacity
Most laptops will have 6-cell Li-ion batteries with 3.5 hours capacity without WiFi and 2.5 hours with WiFi when new. You don’t need the larger 9-cell batteries with 5+ hours capacity. The protrude from the back of your laptop and add to the weight. Needless expense. Keep your meetings short instead :P In the future, I will write about maximising the life of your laptop battery. (back)

USB Ports
Most 14″ laptops will have two USB ports. Check that you can insert two devices simultaneously into the ports (they are usually one over the other or beside each other): plug in your USB mouse and your USB Pen drive. If you need more ports, invest in a 4:1 USB expansion hub. (back)

Microphone
Choose a laptop with a built-in microphone. The Lenovo Thinkpad, for instance, has a microphone receiver just above the ESC key (or just below the CTRL key on newer models). This way, you don’t have to wear a headphone and with a speaker attachment during voice chat via, say, Google Talk. (back)

Bluetooth
A must for syncing your phone (or your friend’s phone) with your laptop. Also great for open-laptop exams where the classroom WiFi router is switched off :P

Kensington lock
Some vendors might include a Kensington lock for your laptop as part of the package. A Kensington lock guards against the physical theft of your laptop. Not likely to happen on campus. Ask the vendor to discard it and lower the price instead.

What else would you like to read?

• Essential B-school software
• Getting the most out of your smartphone, B-school Edition
• Maximising your laptop battery life

I had a DVD of this distro from Novell, but since my old PC didn’t have a DVD ROM, I never got a change to have a look at this supposedly cool distro. RedHat/Fedora has been my mainstay since the bad old days of Linux 2.0.

SUSE’s installation is about as easy to use as Fedora’s, but it’s certainly more powerful. The only gripe I have is their handling of multilayered dialogs – where one dialog/preference box leads to another – leavs much room for improvement. The NTFS resizer was a joy to use! IBM’s default partitioning scheme is to use a ~4GB partition (which they call PreDesktop Area) for recovery, and use the rest as ine large C: drive. In addition, when you first boot the TP, Windows converts this FAT32 drive to NTFS. I’m glad SUSE was able to resize this so well; Fedora and the rest MUST have this feature by now!

(I’d do away with Windows XP altogether except for the fact that I’d paid good money for this copy – and IBM doesn’t provide installation CDs! GRRRR!)

The installation is simple for a newbie – if he/she sticks with the (decent) defaults, and is sufficiently flexible for a power user to tweak. I picked almost all of the packages SUSE had to offer. However, the installation itself takes a very long time – 4 GB took 2 hours to install! This is unacceptable, guys!

Once I was done, though, the most adorable little chameleon greeted me at startup! This was a welcome change from the furious cascade of kernel debug messages I was used to in Fedora. Even RHGB – Fedora’s attempt at graphical boot, although professional-looking – isn’t as pretty as this. My first virtual console was in a nice framebuffer.

OK. SUSE makes the best KDE desktop in the world. Period. No arguments about this one. I’ve tried Mandrake, RHEL and Fedora, and no one puts as much into their KDE as SUSE. I’ll put up a screenshot of their default desktop sometime soon. YAST is very nicely integrated into KDE’s Control Centre. SAX2, SUSE’s X configuration tool, rocks. The menus are well arranged, lots of applications, sensible defaults. Two great-looking wallpapers.

Gnome sucks. I hope fervently that things have improved in the 9.2 release and in Novell Linux Desktop. It’s amazing that fonts that look so great in KDE can be so unreadable in Gnome. And don’t accuse me of not tweaking enough – I’m a Gnome lover too, and know a fair bit about using and configuring it. YAST isn’t too well integrated here – and it’s difficult for a user to run a pure-Gnome SUSE desktop , because all of YAST’s modules seem to have been written using the Qt libraries. Oh, well – SUSE did always tout itself as a KDE-centric distro. Wonder how Ximian’s changed that.

SUSE’s notebook support is amazing! I’ve yet to go over this in detail, but suspend/stand-by and hibernate worked like a charm! There’s this YAST module which is a front-end to kpowersave – and it’s the most intuitive way I’ve seen to manage a mobile computer’s power-handling features. I was advised not to try ACPI, and to stick to APMd. I’ve done that. There’s this nice piece on OSNews.com about SUSE 9.2 Pro’s power handling support. Hope to upgrade to 9.2 soon, will try that out. More on this as I explore further.

The R50′s scroll feature doesn’t work yet, but there’s a program by the name of TPScroll which apparently does a good job at fixing that. I’ve dowloaded it, will try it out tonight. More later.

OK – so that’s my first experience with Linux on a Laptop – and, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s been quite appealing!

Here are the specs:
1.) ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 64MB 128-bit DDR Video Ram Operating at 210 MHz.
2.) 14.1″ TFT Screen
3.) Trackpoint
4.) Touchpad
5.) ThinkLight at the top of the screen illuminates the screen in low light conditions.
6.) System and power status indicators:
Wireless status,
Bluetooth status,
Numeric lock,
Caps lock,
Drive in use,
Power on,
Battery status, and
Standby status.
7.) Function keys for screen brightness, full screen functionality, web browser forward and back buttons, (these are all hard-wired key functions, so their usage is not OS-dependent. However, a nice project called the TPB (ThinkPad Buttons) enables an on-screen display on Linux.
8.) Built-in microphone
9.) Volume increase/decrease/mute buttons.
10.) Centrino Mobile technology – wireless support built-in via”integrated dual diversity antenna built into the display”.
11.) 40 GB HDD
12.) DVD-ROM – no CD/RW! :-(
13.) 2 USB ports
14.) Video-out connector
15.) Agere systems AC’97 Modem
16.) PC card slot – to attach modem, data storage, network, and SCSI connector cards.
17.) Built-in Infrared port.

Right now I’m doing a bit of research regarding the best distribution for install on this new machine.

Since I’ve got a nice licenced copy of Windows XP here, I don’t want to dump this one to install Linux… but the problem is that all 40GB here on my TP has been allocated to one primary partition. So first I need a distro which can resize my Windows partition. I hear SUSE can. I have a nice SUSE 9.1 Professional DVD here which Novell shipped me free of cost sometime back… and I think it’s got Ximian Desktop included (drool!). So that’s my first choice.

If I don’t like SUSE (I doubt that!), I’m going to use their installation program to resize this partition, and install FC3 on top. But I’m tired of RedHat/Fedora and I want a change.
Let’s see how this goes.

Update (January 22nd 2005): I’ve got Novell Linux Desktop 9 on my Thinkpad now; and got rid of Windows XP altogether! Although this is a great distro, I still want to give SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional a try. I’m attempting to dload all the 5 CDs (Five! How bloated can Linux distros get anyways?), and I’ll write about it when I’ve installed the bunch.