Athlons IMHO draw far too much power for a laptop, and a mobile Athlon is usually on a crippling chipset, like an ALi with SDRAM.
Pentium IV's are even worse in terms of power consumption, and they are usually never clocked over 1.4GHz in a laptop because of heat concerns. What's worse, they are often on crippling SDRAM chipsets as well.
Pentium III's should do much better in a laptop. The older .18u P3's draw about half the power clock-for-clock as a T-bird and perform only slightly worse. The new .13u P3's should be even more power-efficient.
If you can get a laptop that carries one of the double-cache Tualatins, that's a a real prize. I've seen such laptops from Compaq for reasonable prices, and I'm quite sure Dell has them as well. Dell, however, is expensive.
I'm currently using a Compaq Presarion 1700T with a P3-750. Battery life is ok; I have it set to SpeedStep down to 500MHz on battery power. The battery will last through some DVDs (though not Terminator 2). It comes with a crappy Phoenix NoteBIOS, which is OK for a laptop, except that its APM layer is not Linux-compatible. APM worked in Win98SE, though, before I deep-sixed the Windows install.
The video card is an ATi Rage MACH64--fortunately not a UMA solution, but don't expect to be playing Quake3 on it. It can, however, do full-screen DVD in Linux. Mine comes with a Conexant HSF WinModem which I never use; it could optionally come with a 10/100 Ethernet card, but I opted for a PCMCIA Intel PRO/100 card instead. The sound card is an ESS Maestro3, which is actually a pretty good sound card--it will put out bass if you have headphones connected, but the built-in speakers won't pick it up. :tongue: There are two USB ports; I'm told later revisions of the laptop include FireWire ports as well. It came with two 64MB DIMMs; it is upgradeable to 512MB and takes standard PC100 SO-DIMMs. The hard drive is a standard 2.5" 4200RPM 16GB IBM hard drive; it is upgradeable.
As far as heat problems go, once or twice I stupidly packed the thing in its case without turning it off. It got extremely warm, but it still works just fine.
I've seen Presario 1720 laptops (very, very much like mine) with 133MHz FSB, dual-cache Tualatins. The last one I saw had twice the RAM, 20GB hard drive, built-in 10/100 network, and a DVD/CDRW combo. It cost $1450 on pricewatch; you may be able to get the price lower by chopping off some options.
Like many OEMs, Compaq will refuse to support the laptop unless it has the original operating system on it.
Kelledin
<A HREF="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/" target="_new">LFS</A>: "You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn; you just hack your distro all day long."
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