I have a 12.5" lenovo thinkpad x220. i5, 8gb ram, kingston hyperX SATA III ssd. The screen is an IPS screen. I run 64-bit ubuntu. I have a 9 cell battery whic

I have a 12.5" lenovo thinkpad x220. i5, 8gb ram, kingston hyperX SATA III ssd. The screen is an IPS screen. I run 64-bit ubuntu. I have a 9 cell battery which, after running powerTop, I get ~12 hours battery life out of coding. This machine is great because I can travel, but it also has VGA out and HDMI out so I can connect to a larger monitor. The SATA III drive was VERY easy to swap out and is ridiculously fast (~500mb/s read/write) The other benefit of this machine is that there is an mSATA port...you can boot off of the mSATA and use a larger platter drive for storage, even boot other OSes that you don't use too often. The i5 vs i7 performance isn't too big of a deal unless you're utilizing multicores all the time. I have a desktop at work with an i7 and honestly, I don't feel much of a difference. In fact, the SSD makes my laptop feel a lot faster. My wife has a MBA 13" that I use from time to time to maintain my IOs app...Thank goodness I didn't get it as my main laptop. As for the review site, try notebookreview.com. I've always used it and is pretty good edit: formatting