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Laptop
Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 7:40 pm
by shiznatix
Ok so my friend needs a new laptop but does not want to spend a lot of money (surprise surprise!). I was thinking just going with a laptop with a formatted HD to spare the expense of Vista and hook him up with Linux. So my question is where would be a good place to shop for a laptop online that has all the right hardware that is supported by Ubuntu or another main stream Linux Distro out of the box?
Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 10:51 pm
by Kieran Huggins
Tigerdirect often has good deals on thinkpads, and they have decent ubuntu support. I bought mine from IBM directly, but it was a fairly special deal at the time. There's a thinkpad wiki with a lot of compatibility information, IBM has always had excellent driver support, and they're extremely linux friendly as a company in general. Keep an eye out for graphics chipsets if you want the compiz / beryl eyecandy - my Intel i915 chipset is nicely supported, but some ATI and Nvidia chips are more troublesome.
Also, buy the base model and drop the extra RAM in yourself - you'll save hundreds, if not thousands. I spent $1100 CDN (including an extra 1GB of after-market RAM) and matched their $1800 model. Yikes!
Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 2:32 am
by matthijs
I'm not sure how much lower-end laptops cost these days, but I can assure that the MacBook is a real mean machine for not too much money (in my humble opinion). With $1099 it might be a few hundred more then another lower-budget pc laptop, but considering the software you get with it and the time you win (less time consumed with installing or troubleshouting) it isn't too much. I also think the macbooks last a lot longer then other laptops. I have friends with 5 yr old iBooks which still work perfectly. And because these mac-freaks always want the latest stuff you might find some good deals on second hand iBooks/powermacs as well.
Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 3:03 am
by Chris Corbyn
You can't beat Dell for prices. Their Inspirons with low-end AMD processors start at £320GBP incl. taxes.
Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 3:04 am
by nickvd
Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 1:56 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Very nice resource. I was thinking of wiping out my wife's broken XP install and replacing it with Ubuntu. My only worry is that the wireless networking won't work and since it was a factory configured setup, I have no drivers for anything on the machine. But I may still do it.
Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 2:08 pm
by jyhm
I've got all my pennies stashed away in my piggy bank but I'm waiting for that slacker Steve Jobs to release 10.5 so I can buy a mac book pro with it installed. I like the idea of having three OS's on one laptop.
Come on Steve Jobs Move your .........
EDIT: But how about ebay, no? You can get something decent from a seller with a high rating.