Hi Dark Raider. I have 2 sony vaio laptops, running with 256 ram, 40 GIG HD, 1.4 GHZ. So far im very happy with this laptop, its fast, its awesome, has a dvd player in it. Bad things are, it has no built in eth card, and it has a winmodem. When i got it, they gave me a pcmcia ethernet card free to go with the laptop, but i still carry an external modem with me.

If you want a laptop thats friendlier with *nix, i recomend you get an IBM laptop, with an internal motorolla modem, since its supported by *nix. Another good laptop is the HP Omnibook series (winmodem), they are reliable too (make sure you upgrade the bios on these though). Reason why im recomending these is cause i have used these in the past, and they have kept me happy.

One more tip, if you decide to buy the sony vaio, make sure you get an extra battery pack. Its known to die sometimes, and afterwards its hard finding one.

Good luck on your new laptop, enjoy...

Cheers

//addon//

just one more thing before i forget.... if you would like to choose SuSE linux as an os, SuSE has a special distrobution that works on macs/power pcs. So that would mean linux on extreme hardware, although macs are known to be very expensive.

cheers.