Hard Wearing Hardware

Those beautiful Apple Macs look very fragile. They are. My wife (Maria's) Mac was small, beautiful but didn't like getting bumped about. Although we'll never know quite what killed it, high on the list of suspects was a recent small fall from the sofa to our hardwood floor.

The machine is dead. All that is salvagable is 512MB of RAM, which was an upgrade from the machine's miserly built in 128MBs, an airport card (very rare now for Mac iBook G3s) and possibly the hard disk drive.

In choosing replacement hardware, we're looking for a laptop certainly. Maria's only request is that it fits into her existing Crumpler bag, which means realistically we're looking for a machine with a 12 - 13 inch screen (no more). Being the techie, I have some slightly more stringent requirements.

CPU

The Mac G3 had a 700mhz processor and I think getting something slightly faster but relatively cheap, should not be a problem. Therefore I am looking to get something in the 1 - 1.5 ghz region, but preferably with some power saving features. This most likely means a Celeron M based machine, or if I am lucky a Centrino.

RAM

The best kept secret amongst geeks is that it is RAM, not CPU speed, that actually affects the day to day performance of most people's machines the most. One reason why laptops always feel so much slower than desktops is that they usually ship with so little memory. It is still no unusual to see brand new budget laptops selling with 256MB of RAM and even Apple's own cutting edge machines come with a miserable 512MB (when OS X demands at least twice that amount).

Linux is fairly resource friendly, but still I am hoping to make use of the spare 512MB of memory from the old G3 and unite it with a machine with perhaps 256MB for a healthy 768MBs.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive)

The second most common reason for laptops being so slow is the HDD. Not because they often lack capacity (which they do) but because the disk speed is usually so much slower than in desktop machines. It is only very recently, and in high spec expensive laptops, that this has begun to change. Therefore a generously roomy, albiet slow, HDD is the best I can hope for. 60GB would be great, but I'll settle for 40GB.

Other

I am hoping for a good battery, although second had laptops nearly always come with batteries in poor condition, so I am going to budget to have to buy a new one. Wireless is a must, but again wireless cards are easy to come buy and adding one should not be a problem. Finally a screen in good condition with no burn-ins or dead pixels is a must.

Finally the machine should be tough... which is why I fancy an IBM Thinkpad. Ugly, functional but as tough as hell. The Thinkpad is pretty much the antithesis of the Apple Mac and is about as uncool as you can get (perhaps apart from getting a Dell). There is also something mildly poetic about buying an IBM machine to run Linux.

My budget - $400 including a new battery if necessary and wireless card. No room for any mistakes...