Re: laptop shopping

On Sun, 25 May 2008 22:03:50 +0000, Time Waster wrote:

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).

There have been several reports on the internet about folks documenting
their refusal to activate MS when it comes up, contacting the manufacturer
and actually getting a rebate - DELL seems to lead in this case.


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.

He's full of s**t.


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.

Last time I checked DELL had a couple of desktops and a couple of laptops
you could order with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. And they have XP systems
readily available as well. You can be pretty damned sure that if Ubuntu
will work with it that Fedora will too.


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?

Absolutely.


Thanks!

.

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