Comparing Inspirons

Inspiron 7000

• Pentium II 300MHz
• 256MB RAM

Since the CPU is several years old, I decided to go with a minimal Gentoo installation. My original intent was to just install screen, ruby, rails, mono, lighttpd, and sqlite. Now that I've discovered overlays, I think it'll be a nice place to smoke-test new GNOME releases and the evolving C# bindings for DBus. Thanks to steev, I'll also be able to see if I can get the Ruby bindings up to speed with the latest DBus release (0.91). There's already a project on RubyForge which hasn't seen love in many moons, so I'm very tempted to dive headfirst into it.

Inspiron 8200

• Pentium 4 1.6GHz
• 256MB RAM

Ubuntu Dapper is a little too memory hungry for 256MB, but this laptop has better battery life and expandability. I'm currently straddling the fence on purchasing a Dell TrueMobile 1150 mini PCI wireless card (an Orinoco-based chipset that's fully supported by Linux) and some more RAM. While the memory limit is supposed to be 1GB, there are successful reports of installing 2GB. I don't think spending $320 on this laptop is quite worth it at the moment though (that's almost a Nokia 770!). So I think I'll settle for a 512MB SODIMM and the wireless card.