#Buying a new laptop#
A friend of mine (Kunal), is going to Insead business school. He asked me to suggest which laptop he should buy.
My Take
Don't blow your money on the fastest processor in the market...there are other parts as well which deserve equal attention. One needs to choose an overall config rather than just the processor speed. I say this because I find that most buyers, especially first time buyers focus more on the processor speeds. As my friend asked me 'should I buy 1.8 ghz or 2 ghz based laptop'.
A computer is nothing more than different parts working together as a team. And as they say 'a team is only as strong/ fast as the weakest/slowest member in the team'. thus you mean find that 1.5ghz base laptop with faster hard disk and better graphics card may be better than 2ghz laptop with a slower hard disk and standard graphics card.

Here is how I go about making a choice:
1. Processor : anything above 1.7 ghz is fine as long as I will only be using it as a normal business user (basic word processing, email, browsing and occasional video playing). If you have lots of money, go for the dual core processors.

2. RAM : another very important part. Minimum 512mb and 1gb if you really want windows on your machine to fly.

3. Hard disk : Yes, capacity is important. But if you want a really fast machine, speed of the hard disk is very impotant. Its measure is revolutions per minute. 5400 rpm is standard and slow. So look for 7200 rpm hard disk.

4. Graphics card : for a business user any standard graphic card is good. But if you want to play some 3d games, then you must have a good video card with dedicated memory. Also check what resolutions are supported.

5. Battery: most buyers do not review this carefully and then complain on getting only 1.5 hours of backup. You should have a minimum of 6 cell battery for around 3 hrs backup on most machines. But you can also pickup a 9 cell battery if you can shell out some extra $$.

6. Size : please check out the size and weight of the laptop very carefully. I have seen people end up buying desktop replacement pcs instead of a laptop. When it comes to screen size big certainly is beautiful but remember that it will be your shoulders that will have to carry it arpund. 14.1'' is a decent size and under 2.2 kgs is good weght for business users. For me 'small is more beautiful' when it comes to laptops.

7. Business vs home : all major brands have two categories of laptops. One for home users and the other for business users. The difference lies in the architecture and the design. You can expect a home user targetted laptop to turn sluggish if it is used for long hours. It will however look very nice, cosmetically, compared to the laptop targetted for business users. Then how to choose? if you want to keep your machine switched on for more than 10 hours at a stretch buy a business notebook.

I guess above should take care of most of the performance related issues. Now all you need to do is see which brand/ model excites you the most. This is very personal, and you will be the best judge.

Happy purchasing!

#OS#

I got hold of the latest Fedora distro FC5 from an expert friend.

I was skeptical whether FC5 will smoothly install on a laptop without messing my Windows XP partition.

I popped the DVD and started the installation. It took a little over an hour for me but I was able to setup FC5 smoothly.

Most interesting aspect of this whole process was the ease with which FC5 detected all my laptop hardware very well. Considering the fact that my machine did not have the standard graphics card, this was really commendable.

Infact, I had lot of problems in installing Windows XP professional from the original Retail version on my earlier IBM R50E laptop. It messed up with the drivers for LAN, sound, graphics. I then had to visit the IBM (Lenovo) website to pick up the drivers.

#e-mail#
Which email client is best for me?

After all this..... my windows XP Professional was live and kicking....

Before I did any more testing.... I wanted to get my e-mail up and running....so next I had to decide - Which e-mail client do I use? '

Popular choices available were :
1. Microsoft Outlook
2. Microsoft Otlook Express
3. Thunderbird
4. Eudora

I had used both outlook and Eduora in the past.

This would have been a no-brainer under normal circumstances, specially when my Microsoft office Profesional license already covered the license for Microsoft Outlook. So I have already paid for one of the most popular e-mail clients .

But my situation was different. I was very keen to start using Linux on my laptop as well. And I knew that unless my business email is not available on Linux, I will not be able to even try it. Which meant that e-mails that I pop fom my server, onto the laptop, should be available on windows as well as Linux.

A tough requirement......... may be not....

Interestingly, I learnt from a friend that Thunderbird installation from Windows side as well as Linux side can access the same email data if the data is kept on a FAT partition. And so I selected Thunderbird over Microsoft Outlook.