Best Developer's Laptop?

[sl4shd0t]

s31523 writes "I love my current laptop, but unfortunately on my last trip the primary LCD went bonkers. It's an older Gateway (2 GB RAM Intel Pentium M 2.0 GHz, ATI M7). There are a handful of features I love about it: [1] Hot-swappable drive bay, with several components that can go in: CD/DVD R/W, extra battery, floppy drive, extra hard drive, memory card reader, etc. The extra battery option is especially appreciated mdash; I can go 4-5 hours on battery power. [2] Docking station / port replicator: I like having my home setup with keyboard, network, and dual screens (a necessity). [3] It runs Linux. OK, I'm a wus, I actually have GRUB command three different OS's: Windows 98 (I have really old embedded software compilers that only run on 98, and yes I have tried every trick in the book to make them run on Linux), Windows XP Pro, and Ubuntu. I'm trying to find a replacement setup that offers the same flexibility and a little better performance. I am open to change as well. So, I ask Slashdot: What is your pick for best developer's laptop under $1,200, considering the features above?"pa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/03/194244/Best-Developers-Laptop?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/10/03/194244"/a/ppa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/03/194244/Best-Developers-Laptop?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9Hf_W7M7ejcGH70QRsIrP7HB2Zs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9Hf_W7M7ejcGH70QRsIrP7HB2Zs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9Hf_W7M7ejcGH70QRsIrP7HB2Zs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9Hf_W7M7ejcGH70QRsIrP7HB2Zs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/4IsqC0jWvYo" height="1" width="1"/

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