laptop shopping

I'm cheap -- been running on an old P3 desktop for some time, with old
versions of Redhat. Now the wife and I want to get a laptop to share,
and anything I buy i want to at least reformat half of it with Linux
(if not all of it). She's a Mac person that doesn't like Windows
either, so she's fine with that as long as she can do word processing.
She's used to NeoOffice/Openoffice.

After some review reading, it looks like maybe HP has the least bad
stuff to say about it. Though, it's easy to see bad things about
all of them.

Now the shmoe at Circuit City tells me that I void the warrantee
by taking Vista off (and of course no discount for removing it,
and you have to order online to get XP instead).

And the shmoe at Best Buy says you also have to special order
to get XP, but you can't run Linux on the modern laptops -- there
will be missing drivers.

I certainly don't believe that -- I'll bet besides maybe some fancier
graphics that I don't care about, things will run just fine. Anyone
bought recent models of a laptop, i'm thinking in the $800 range --
and have a fine experience with Linux on it? Most likely I'd stick
with Fedora since that's what I use at work.

I don't need a flame fest about Sony's and Dells and HPs necessarily,
though maybe that would be fun too. (I can read Amazon for those, though.)
Are the sales critters pretty much full of it as I would expect?

Thanks!
.

Relevant Pages

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