(posted at 10:59PM BST) 
My four-year old Medion laptop has been acting rather erratically over the last few months; Linux occasionally hard-locks on it and even the rarely-used Windows XP install was freezing for no apparent reason.
Running memtest86 on it determined that one of the DIMMs inside was faulty but removing that hasn't fixed the problem - as the laptop has more than earnt its' original purchase price throughout its' useful lifetime, I resolved to find myself a replacement.
Medion were out of the running instantly as they never replied to my kindly-worded e-mail asking whether I could purchase a replacement optical drive for the aforementioned laptop after it starting spewing out burnt discs with ever-so-slightly corrupted TOCs - no response - machine was out of warranty at the time so I didn't expect a free repair/replacement of the existing drive but they could have at least responded to say they didn't sell replacement drives rather than outright ignoring me.
I did consider an Apple MacBook Pro but for what you get, the hardware spec is incredibly low and I am not all that dependent on Mac OS X even though I own an iMac.
So, I put together a wishlist:
- Twin Core CPU (no preference for AMD or Intel)
- NVIDIA VGA chipset (ATI Linux support is crap and the Intel GMA950 chipset isn't powerful enough for stuff like Beryl)
- Bluetooth (so I can work remotely using my HTC Wizard's GPRS connection)
- Webcam (because I am heavily involved in voice-over-IP installations and H.323 support is now incorporated into Asterisk as a standard feature)
I looked at the Acer Aspire 5633WLMi but I rejected it for a reason which most people would say 'WTF ?' to - the backslash '' key sat above the Enter key rather than to the left of the 'Z' key.
Karl's old laptop was exactly the same and it used to drive me insane when I was forced to use it.
The only other laptops out there which met all of the above criteria was the Asus F3Jc and the Asus F3Jp (the F3Jc having an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 CPU and the F3Jp having an AMD Turion X2 ML-xx CPU) - while the chips perform reasonably close to each other in terms of speed, the F3Jc won out because the Intel Core 2 Duo chips are slightly less power-hungry than their AMD cousins.
The Asus F3Jc arrived on my desktop yesterday morning.
It came with Windows Vista Home Premium installed - which never even got booted - a quick run of DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) sorted out a nice clean hard disk - an install of Fedora Core 6 was up and running within 20 minutes.
One thing that does piss me off is that the machine doesn't ship with any installation media for Windows Vista Home Premium (only a recovery DVD) - which means that if I ever want to run Microsoft's latest abortion on my laptop for whatever reason, it couldn't co-exist with my Linux partition as the recovery DVD would helpfully wipe everything out on the hard disk.
This is surely anti-competitive behaviour in itself as I am currently in possession of a license to run Windows Vista Home Premium on my new laptop but I cannot do so unless I forfeit my preferred OS which is clearly unacceptable to me.
I may pull an ISO of Windows Vista Home Premium from one of the ol' BitTorrent sites and then try and install it using the key stuck to the bottom of the laptop - if that works, it will at least demonstrate one legal purpose for BitTorrent sites tracking ISOs of Microsoft software - so that their own legitimate customers can install the software that they have rightfully paid for.
All that said, the Asus F3Jc is a really nice piece of hardware; Fedora Core 6 runs like a dream on it! | 
