Laptop update

I’ve narrowed it down a little bit, to a choice between four laptops, each with pros and cons. I’ve come to realise that if I want at least a 15" laptop,

1. It will be a bit heavy. For reference, my current, crappy laptop as a 14" screen and weighs 5.6 lbs.
2. Battery life typically isn’t fantastic.

However, I can’t bring myself to contemplate anything smaller than that anymore. I’m too spoiled by dual monitor setups and ≥20" screens; I need my desktop real estate, damn it!

Summary of laptops

Model	Pros	Cons
system76 Pangolin Performance	Reasonable price NVidia graphics Attractive Support Linux-centric business Not too heavy (for 15.4" laptops)—5.8 lbs	Poor battery life: 1.5–2 hours
system76 Serval Professional	NVidia graphics Very attractive (brushed steel!) Support Linux-centric business	Poor battery life: 1.5–2 hours Heavy—7.1 lbs (brushed steel!)
ZaReason Strata 4660	NVidia graphics Support Linux-centric business Better battery life: ~3 hours (9-cell option)	Fairly heavy—6.5 lbs
Lenovo Thinkpad T500	Thinkpad quality! Good battery life: 4.5–5 hours (9-cell option)	Fairly heavy—6.3 lbs Intel or ATI graphics

Notes on the above:

1. NVidia only offers closed-source drivers, but they are good closed-source driver. All else being equal I’d much rather go with a more open company and architecture, but things are very far from being equal. The Intel X4500 chipset in the Lenovo laptops is pretty dinky compared to the ATI and NVidia offerings—I don’t know how well Compiz would even run…and heaven knows about getting TV-out to work.

   Meanwhile, the ATI options in the Thinkpads is the Mobility Radeon 3650, which doesn’t seem to work at all in Linux, and I gather they tend to run pretty hot. That’s not even an option; if I go Thinkpad, I go Intel graphics.

2. Meanwhile, the NVidia laptops all offer two video output ports, one of which is either VGA or DVI depending on the model, the other of which is HDMI. Nary an S-video output in sight! I want to be able to lug my laptop around and hook it up to TVs if I so desire; I’d like to do so through RCA. I’ve never used HDMI. Do TVs usually have these? Is this going to be useful? —Is it even going to be usable?

3. In spite of the insistence of some, I’m not very interested in a Macbook… I’ll freely grant that the Macbook Pro is a very nice-looking machine. If it were no more expensive than other laptops, if I were sure it had good Linux support, and if it had more mouse buttons, I might consider it for hardware. However, it is expensive, and I can’t get by on just one mouse button. And yes, I’m talking Linux—OS X drives me insane; I despise it. I might come around to it if I used it for a while, but I’m not prepared to spend ~$2000 on a ‘maybe’.

[Poll #1368320]

I’m currently leaning weakly towards the Strata, but thoughts and opinions would be very, very warmly welcomed.