- Regardless of physical dimensions, a fine dot pitch display. My current screen is a 15" normal (non-widescreen) display SXGA+ which has been great. That works out at about 116 DPI or a 0.2177mm dot pitch. It's well worth whatever it costs extra to get a good built in display. Screen DPI calculator.
- No shiny / reflective display finishes. Quite simply, a deal breaker. I hate those shiny screens.
- Built in serial port. USB to Serial converters are such a pain. Having a permanent /dev/ttyS0 makes such a difference.
- A good keyboard, or at least, one that you could type on all day without causing injury.
- SD card reader.
- Reasonably sized hard drive and lots of memory. Probably more important than a grunty processor.
- Sensibly positioned USB ports and other sockets. Preferably on the back, as frequently used ports on the side can be annoying.
Ideal things to look for in a laptop
31 December 2009