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No-OS, Computers without Operating System (for those who want to install their own Operating System):

  http://www.abestpc.com/laptop.htm Laptops

  http://www.adamant.com/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.avadirect.com/ Desktops Laptops
  http://www.com4.nl/ Desktops
  http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.goldenelectronics.co.uk/ Desktops
  http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.ion-technologies.com/ Laptops
  http://store.madtux.org/ Desktops/

  http://www.laptopchoice.com.au/ Laptops
  http://www.mtechlaptops.com/ Laptops

  http://www.mwave.com/ Laptops
  http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/ Laptops
  http://www.powernotebooks.com/ Laptops

  http://www.rjtech.com/ Laptops
  http://www.topmicrousa.com/laptops-notebooks.html Laptops

  http://www.unitedmicro.com/ Desktops Laptops
  http://xnbs.com/ Laptops

  http://www.xtremenotebooks.com/ Laptops
  http://www.zepto.com/ Laptops
 
  http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/23168/

Along the same lines, Hypersonic PC also sells dual HDD/RAID laptops. They are large, and the battery life is short, but it might be just what you need.

On the other hand, given that a CF card is smaller than a laptop harddrive, and many laptop PATA controllers seem fully functional in the sense that they'll support both a master and slave drive, I wonder if you could hack two CF cards to fit into a regular laptop where the harddrive would usually fit, and then use software raid? (though I imagine you would lose a lot of the speed benefits doing that)

Check out the FX7 from Hypersonic (http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/FX7/), a Clevo whitebox available from several other vendors as well.

Granted, at 12lbs and ~1 hour battery life, it is neither light nor highly mobile. Still, as a portable desktop replacement, it kicks ass compared to the Intel duos used in the article.

That depends upon what your goal is. The Pentium-M is superior in energy conservation. If this isn't your concern might I suggest: http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/FX7/

--Neth

Sager is the US seller of clevo notebooks in the US. They are the people who provide the notebooks to retailers such as Hypersonic, Alienware, and a few other retailers. Sager's direct-consumer tech support is admittedly pretty bad, but that's because they do their business through retailers, and prefer to do consumer tech support through them. (Besides, the retailers give 200 dollar or so discounts off of Sager's prices as is.)

I myself use a Sager NP9860 as my main workstation. It's simply the highest quality laptop I've ever used. Well worth the absurdly high price for the performance it gives. It's heavy as hell for a laptop, not meant to be portable, but I carry it around school and work all day as is. When the day's done, having a laptop that can play the latest games maxed out at 1680x1050 is fairly nice.
I eagerly await the release of the NP9750, which is an AMD-powered equivalent to the NP9890.
If you want to learn about notebooks, the best place to discuss them is going to be at NotebookForums . It has a large, active, friendly (providing you don't make fun of certain user's favorite retailers.) community willing to discuss just about anything about laptops.

Must be the same gene that makes people go for black light posters.

Do they even design their own stuff? Their small form factor cases look 100% identical to Aspire's.

Those may very well be excellent machines -- good build quality, good components, good performance. I don't doubt that. In fact, their dead-pixel policy and QC in general is something the whole industry should respect.

But I'd be downright embarassed to be seen with something that looked like that. I'd rather be seen with a barbie laptop ( http://www.cnet.com.au/i/r/2004/PC/barbie_laptop_3 00x225.jpg ) for, at the very least, the irony. For god's sake, why do people think that shiny electric blue, or green or red, ( http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/_inventoryImages/imag es/color_choice_m2/piercing.jpg ) and a huge ugly logo is a good thing?

I'm not saying iBooks or Powerbooks are the be all of design, but I'll tell you one thing: They are designed to look adult, and respectable. I can open my powerbook in a meeting with important people -- in a recent situation, bigwigs of the russian oil industry -- and feel like they will still respect me. As agraphic designer that's important.

I still think people are buying the iBooks for the coolness, because it is the far better looking than your boring corporate compaq/dell laptops. However for those who don't mind spending the money, nothing beats the custom color beefed up Hypersonic laptop line. http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/

I suppose Apple will want to have the "1st Dual Core Laptop" and the only way that's gonna happen is with Intel.

Nice theory, but you can buy a dual core laptop today if you wanted to.

Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array

Sure, but that definately depends on battery life. RAIDs are old news, go see Hypersonic. But I wouldn't exactly consider those lugs laptops.

Hypersonic PC sells laptops with multiple harddrives. I know someone who has one of the models that has a Pentium 4. You can run them as either RAID 0 or RAID 1, and I believe JBOD. Granted, the laptops are huge, but you atleast get a numeric keypad on them, unlike most other large laptops where they just waste all the space by using the same crappy, limited keyboard as the smaller models.

hypersonic pc: http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/

offers laptops gives you to option of no OS for 100 $ cheaper. They have quality machines also.

Meanwhile, my brand new Athlon 64 laptop:

a) Doesn't have any drivers available online
b) Refuses to install both 32- and 64-bit versions of Fedora 1-2, SuSe, and Mandrake (locks up before setup completes)
c) Locks up on Windows 'shutdown'

If I had the money, I would seriously consider a laptop from Hypersonic-PC. They seem to have decent priced gaming laptops.

Screw these, the AMD Mobile 64 laptops runs just as fast or faster than P4 "Extremes", they usually have a way longer battery life, and they don't scorch your meat and two veg while your using it (the laptop, that is, though for some its both :P ). Even if you do want the P4, get a Hypersonic GX7. About $3000 USD cheaper and have better audio. They also have a translucent green and purple paint job that, in my opinion, is better than the flag paint job. Still wouldn't get the translucent paint job though, after awhile it'll make you nauseas looking at it. They have an AMD M64 too (the AX7) as would be my choice (was actually planning on getting the Inspiron XP but the AX7 looks good too).

I recently bought an AMD 3400+ based laptop from a company called Hypersonic PC. So far, it's a fantastic machine. Hypersonic was cheaper than Alienware and offered the higher-end 64-bit processor at a great price.

I travel a lot and actually was given $1000 from my partner toward replacing my old HP Omnibook so I would be more effective when working from the road (he was tired of my bitching about capacity, connectivity, etc..)

When I am on the road, I really appreciate a system that is powerful enough to game (I really don't socialize much from the hotel rooms) as well as work. I game pretty regularly. The term I've found used across the industry is a "Desktop Replacement" laptop.

I got this thing called the "Oyster" docking station and hooked up the VGA port to the 20" monitor I used to use with my desktop.

Given the large video memory and fast video processor (ATI 9800 128Mb) I now run dual monitors at full speed, so I actually improved the capabilities of my workstation beyond speed and memory. I paid about $2900 including bells & whistles: 802.11 a/b/g card, 1G Memory, extra high-cap battery, the AMD 3400+ (as opposed to the 3000+ all the other US manufacturers were promoting.)

So far, I am happy as a clam (oyster?) and this thing screams with UT2004 (all settings at max.) My old desktop gets relegated to become my wife's media station / family backup server.

Also -- they claim the AX6 is upgradeable to the 3700+ but I won't be holding my breath. You can get it in a variety of beautiful colors,too.

I bought one from Hyperdata which is basically the retail front for Sunrex. I'm very happy with it so far, it seems well put together and haven't noticed any hardware defects.

This is definitely not for someone who plans to carry their laptop around all day, but it's fine for occassionally lugging to work, conferences, vacation, etc. Besides, the performance and largeish screen are very nice.

I was daring and ordered mine sans OS. After a couple of tries and a little poking around on the web I was able to install Fedora Core 1 (x86-64 version) successfully. The 2 main tricks are

1. disable frame buffering during install, "linux nofb"
2. the installer won't recognize the Radeon 9600 mobility, you have to hand configure and use the VESA driver

• underperforming video driver (no surprise)
• wireless kernel module not found
• misc minor software issues that are probably due more to the imaturity of FC1 x86-64.

The cost is... Absurd. Even for a top-end gaming laptop.

Let's see. For $2,500, I can get an Athlon64 laptop which:
1) Dominates gaming performance (games, you know, the point of the Dell laptop's existance)
2) Will run for more than 45 minutes on battery, becaues of Cool'n'Quiet technology. Mine runs for about 3 hours on battery. Honestly, a high end Pentium IV in a laptop? While we live in infinite battery land, why not add a 21" CRT monitor?
3) Isn't a Dell laptop.

Or, if I still like Dell (they aren't bad for the price sometimes), and am not one of the 95% of the world's clueless that still believes the CPU clockspeed = performance, I can buy a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1.7GHz Pentium M (which is very close or equal in performance to a 3GHz Pentium IV in most tasks), with an ATI Radeon 9600 Mobile and 1GB of memory, for about $2,600.

I have to say, this new Dell laptop is clearly targetted towards complete idiots with too much money on their hands. It isn't even a "just for rich folks which can afford the finest things in life" unit, because those "rich folks" can get a hell of a lot more laptop for the price, and not have the cheap stigma that is attached to every Dell laptop (except the admittedly very good Dell Precision series (which is made by the same ODM that builds some of IBM's laptops).

You'd have a hard time buying one, though:

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They do look pretty nice, though.

If I wanted more than a great paint job, I'd go for a Hypersonic laptop... same great red color (among other colors) and I'd get great performance, too.
On the other hand, if I were silly enough to consider a sound effect during startup like the one described "cool", I'd never go for performance if I could get the brand name... Silly.

This is not one of the first Athlon64 laptops. I have had an Athlon64 laptop for almost two months, and they have been available since late October/early November 2003.

If the market doesn't catch fire, your desk or legs will...

This is not true at all. The laptop runs at 800MHz 95% of the time (whenever the full 2GHz is not needed). At that speed, the CPU has a peak heat dissipation of 35W, and a typical output of 28W. This is well below Pentium IV laptops, and is below the peak output of most Pentium-M chips at their full speed.
Even at 2GHz, it outputs at most around 85W (max theoretical heat output). Compare this to laptops with the Pentium IV Extreme Edition (available from many vendors), which has a typical heat output of over 100W--and that is at idle! Don't even ask about power usage when actually doing something.

I get a good 3 1/2 hours of battery life on a single charge. That is pretty damn good for a laptop which is more powerful than 95% of the full desktop processors out there, including my own. When it runs at full speed all night, the mouse pad and right side of the keyboard get fairly warm, but not to a point that it makes the machine uncomfortable to use. Warmth is comparable to the Dell Latitude D800, which uses a Pentium-M.

Unfortunately, it does not support dual batteries, and has no modular optical drive bay (the DVD drive is set when the machine is assembled), but these aren't major issues for most people. It also has a rather bulky power supply for the use of A/C power, complete with its own tiny cooling fan. This does not help the weight, which is already nearly 8lbs with battery. Ah well--it's more powerful than my desktop, reasonably light, and is MUCH smaller than certain 12-lb Pentium IV laptops. One often wonders if manufacturers have a different definition of "lap" than the rest of us.

hypersonic pc has been selling one for a while as well. They seem to be pretty decent machines, might by one with my tax refund. -siniset

I've been drooling over Hypersonic's Laptops for quite a long time now, and I find it very hard to believe that either of these companies have the first Athlon 64 laptop (which Hypersonic has had basically since the Athlon Mobile 64 was announced) or the first RAID array in a laptop, which Hypersonic has had for a long time in their Aviator GX8 series.

Way too many "journalists" see something like that and go "whoa, that must be the first time that's ever been done." without ever looking into it.