OT - recommendations for an ultralight laptop?

Whistle
1

Hey guys -

I’m in the market for a lightweight laptop and figured I’d see if anyone has suggestions. I was the brief owner of a Dell Inspiron 300m but due to serious hardware issues and a complete failure of Dell to give me any support whatsoever, I will not be considering any Dell machines. A real shame, too, as I liked the 300m. When it was working.

Here’s the specs I’m looking for, with a little bit of wiggle room as I know I won’t find something exactly like this in my price range (about $1,800 to $2,000, if I get a job soon).

Use: Primary machine - I’ll be selling my desktop to help pay for it. Must be powerful enough to do medium-level photo and sound editing (mostly in photoshop and goldwave). I don’t intend to play games or watch movies on it. Must be extremely portable as I will (hopefully) be a graduate student doing a lot of traveling. Even for me.

Desired specs:

Processor: about 1 to 1.4 gigs
Hard drive size: Greater than or equal to 60 GB
Screen: Normal dimension ratio, not the wide screen stuff. I am used to a 15 inch monitor on my desktop so I don’t need anything big. I’m willing to sacrifice some screen size for portability. The screen on the 300m was fine for my needs.
RAM: At least 512 MB
Networking: Wireless 802.11 b/g ready
Maximum weight of about 3.5 lbs. Ideally, there will be a docking station that leaves most of the guts in my room and the laptop itself is very light and portable.
Media drive: A CD/RW would be nice. Don’t need a DVD drive or a floppy drive.
Ports for other stuff: A slot for secure digital (SD) memory cards would be great as that’s what my camera uses. However, the SD slot on the Dell machine fried my memory card, so I’m slightly leery of them at the moment. USBs are good, too, as I would use an external USB mouse when docked. The standard line/mic in, headphones out stuff is required, of course. I won’t be using an external monitor and I’m unlikely to have a printer.

Serious bonus points for a machine that can deal with both US and UK power grids (given the correctly-shaped outlet adapter).

Suggestions welcome here, in PM, or email. Thanks!

2

Heya Beth,

Gee, you want something small. What is it, you’ve heard of a smaller one but never had one? He! Anyway, I guess you want something like that then:

Laptop</a](http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&dept=1&WLBS=fsweb9&sku_id=0665000FS10040569&catid=&newdeptid=1’>Laptop</a)>

This is a known small model, I’m not sure how much they are in the states, but they’re only 2KG, very light!

3

For the best storage ratio per weight and price, try this kind of notebook:

4

There are a few Toshibas you could check out. The M2 meets all of your spec requirements, but at 5 lbs it’s not a true ultra light. It does have a lot of different configuration options though, you could upgrade some components and still stay within your budget.
Toshiba M2
The real lightweight model is the R100 at 2.4 lbs. It costs a bit more, and the specs don’t totally match your list. But if portability is your main priority you might consider it.
Toshiba R100

Charlie

5

The ThinkPad X Series from IBM are really nice.

The Fujitsu P5000 (there are a few different models) look good too…not sure if you can get the 60G HD tho.

I did a bunch of research on this recently but haven’t made a purchase yet. It’s for work so I’m waiting to see how much money I have left in my budget towards the end of the fiscal year (June).

-Brett