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Has anybody got an ultraportable laptop / large netbook, or have comments on them? I'm talking about things with 11.6" screens and CULV Celeron processors - eg HP DM1, Acer 1410, Samsung X120, Dell 11z - as a more powerful alternative to a netbook. How is the real world battery life for these (reviews suggest quite significant differences between these models, but I'm not sure if they're comparing apples with oranges)? Oh, and I'm also not interested in a Mac, or anything else similarly expensive - budget limited.
I bought a 2nd hand IBM Thinkpad X60 and added a high capacity battery to it - giving an ultra portable that runs all standard packages nicely, and will, given a bit of extra time do photo processing.
With wifi on it'll run for a good 5 hours on battery.
Cost - £330 for the laptop, £100 for the ( genuine ) battery.
Interesting suggestion - I've found one of those gong s/h refurbished, though the budget doesn't really stretch to a replacement battery as well, which maybe puts it over budget in total. Just wondering how a 5 year old computer like that compares to the dual core Celerons I'm looking at.
My mate and his GF just bought two HP DM3. His is some high spec US jobbie, her's a standard UK one. Both laptops are really really nice and the battery lasts for around 7 hours. Aluminium case, great keyboard, well made and not that much bigger than my GF's 11.6 Acer. Worth considering. Sometimes go under £400 on eBay.
My mate has an Acer Timeline with dual core celeron (something like t3000?) and the battery lasts for about 6hrs+ (he has a 15.6 screen) but the computer is very slow, flash kills it.
As always check argos-clearancebargains on eBay (You'll find them on Daily Deals tab) and they always have some very good deals on netbooks and laptops. I think they were selling the Samsung off Your list recently.
I've had a lot of X series - really good kit, and expandable should you wish to take a weight penalty for more battery life or extra ports / optical drive etc. Being IBM/Lenovo spares are readily avaiable. I ahve one in front of me right now running multiple VMs for testing scenarios... makes the little disk chunder a bit when working hard but you can't have everything.
Major plus point - they can take a beating, this one goes all over Europe and I'm not exactly kind to it.
My current one is an X61s with dual Core2, 4Gb RAM - still gets decent battery life, but I expect they aren't cheap at the moment.
Probably the only thing I can think of that might cause you an issue is integrated graphics - I don't think there was a version with a decent separate video card, but I don't do anything that would stress the built in one. It'd get there eventually I'm sure.