What would be the best laptop for FreeBSD?

[rex]

Currently I'm running FreeBSD on a HP pavilion desktop. But this desktop belongs to my room mate and he'll be taking it with him in a month or two. So I'll have to buy something to run FreeBSD. Now I'm not able to decide between laptop and desktop? Problem with desktop it would not be portable and problem with laptop, I doubt I'll be able to run it for days without powering it down.

Is anyone out there running there servers on laptops? . If yes which laptop would be best?
My roommate has HP pavilion laptop and it heats up too much, so definitely not HP laptops.

And I'm more inclined towards buying a laptop then desktop.

[TerryP]

I've heard of people using old laptops as home servers, with proper care it should hold up to the wear & tear for awhile, just don't expect the battery to last that long xD.


You might want to check out one of the laptop HCLs.

[rex]

Battery is not a problem. I'll be mostly using it as a loptop and it'll act as a server when I'm not around. I'm just worried whether it will be able to handle stress of long uptime. For me long uptime is no more then a week as I'm still in the learning curve and often I've to bring it down for something.

[TerryP]

My laptop often runs for at least 4 hours a day, sometimes 8-12 without shutdown, and no explosions yet ;-) but I do take good care not to block the ventilation ports and such. The only bad thing, is the 'palm prints' on the thing from my hands... Whether from heat + pressure or just extreme use, but it's a purely cosmetic issue (cheap plastic external casing).


Personally if the laptop is capable of proper cooling, and placed in the appropriate environment, I don't see any reason why a laptop can't handle a long uptime. As long as it's properly made and can offer a decent MTBF rate for her parts.


You also might want to check out these threads here:

• *BSD laptops, JMJ_coder
• Your FreeBSD laptop, Vermaden, many good resources
• Your NetBSD laptop, Vermaden, many good resources
• Your OpenBSD laptop, Vermaden, many good resources

[vermaden]

IMHO get a good Dell Latitude or IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad.

[JMJ_coder]

For what its worth - when I was just the past couple weeks looking at laptops, the Lenovo/IBM Thinkpads consistently got rave reviews for their friendliness with Unix and Linux. That is one of the major factors in why I ultimately bought a Lenovo T61 (haven't received it yet, though).

[anemos]

In the company I work for, there is a Dell Latitude D610 for general use. The laptop is a bit old, however it runs 24x7. Every now and then we just format it and thats it. Its battery's energy runs out within a minute but since it is always plugged in it stays constantly up without getting hot.
Vermaden's lists TerryP refered to contain a lot of useful info.