Hey, so I think my home laptop is very close to flipping its last bit. The screen is almost gone (I'm using an external LCD), I've had some issues with the hard drive in the past, and this morning, it had a misboot. It's kind of like a miscarriage, except more serious, cause it's my laptop. (yeah yeah I'm a horrible person I know)

Anyway, I was thinking of shopping around for a laptop, but I figure I should speed up the process, so that I can do all the backups I need before it's too late. I'm not gonna pay for data recovery if it comes to it, and I don't want to waste CDs when I should be using DVDs.

I haven't looked around in a long time for laptops, so I'm slightly out of the loop on what's out there. I was hoping someone here could give me some tips on what's good these days. It doesn't need to be super high performance, and it doesn't need to be incredibly slim (it mostly won't leave the house, actually).

What I DO need is for it to solidly handle running Ubuntu Gutsy. IIRC, HP is the correct answer when looking at Linux compatibility. I'll be asking this question in some more tech-oriented forums, but I know there are a couple of people here who can help on this.

I was looking at this one: http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product...rodid=11263004 but I have no idea how it compares to others. This particular model is interesting, but there are some red flags, like...

Its slightly more expensive brother, http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product...rodid=11262971 has twice the L2 cache and a faster bus, which makes it slightly more appealing. Also, while it looks like 160GB is pretty normal for a laptop HD today, I kinda wish it were 7200rpm. Also, I'm not sure I'm liking the fact that the graphics accelerator is shared. Sure, I don't plan on using it for a whole lot of high-end gaming, but still, I'm a compiz fusion cube fan, and that will affect performance (and with game programming as a hobby, it might get in the way, even though it'll force me to worry more about performance, which I guess is okay). Thoughts? Recommendations on better models that you know are very happy running Linux? How do you guys think the price compares for those models?