Laptop fu
 

Personal epiphany, during six hours of weekend travel: I want a laptop.

A lower-powered system will do nicely -- I'm thinking Pentium II or less -- as this would be more of a toy than anything I'd do serious work on. (Most likely, its primary purpose would be futzing around with emulators and MAME during road trips.)

I took a look at compgeeks.com, and noticed that every entry contained the disclaimer "BATTERY IS NOT COVERED BY WARRANTY; the battery is not guaranteed to hold a charge." This is probably not unusual. Any recommendations as to who might sell one and say "we'll guarantee that it'll run for three hours or so before you need to plug it back in?"

Buy a used ThinkPad from IBM. They run auctions on eBay. We've bought two 600E's (a 366MHz PII & a 400MHz PII) and have been very happy with them. (They survived the fire too, despite heavy smoke & soot damage.)

Let me make sure I'm clear on this - buy it <b>from</b> IBM - that's the only way you get the full warranty.

We had a HD go bad in one of 'em - they overnighted us a replacement, no questions asked.