[ale] Laptop and linux

[Pat Regan]

Tim Watts wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm considering a laptop and I want to dual boot it w/ Linux/XP (or at least 
> have an XP image I can boot into a la VmWare). What models are particularly 
> well/poorly suited for this? Any vendors who can build this for me? Any linux 
> distro's better for this than others (I have SuSE 9.2 on my current tower 
> which I bought from Monarch; I got pretty good svc from them although they 
> only seemed to have 1 linux guy who was "part-time" at that)?

I don't know how much machine you actually need, so this may be entirely
the wrong advice for you.  Maybe it will be useful for someone else :).

I recently, probably a few months ago, helped my girlfriend pick out a
laptop.  We needed to go as cheap as possible, but still get a machine
she could use.

I am aware that there are a lot of $500 laptops advertised all the time,
but they all seem rather flimsy to me.  I decided to start looking
around for a used laptop.  I am sure there are plenty of other good
choices, but I decided on a Toshiba Tecra 8100.  I had one supplied by
an employer once, every piece of hardware worked at the time under Linux
(even the winmodem), and I knew it was a pretty sturdy machine.

I want to say she payed in the neighborhood of about $300 bucks or so,
including upgrading the memory.  It is a P3 700 with a 10ish gig hard
drive.  It came with 2 64 meg sticks, we bought a 256 to replace one of
them for 320 gig.

My work laptop had 512 MB, and I always had a Win2000 VMWare session
opened.  It ran quite well for what I was doing.

The laptop actually is pretty sturdy.  It has already been dropped once,
probably from about 3 feet or so.  I didn't see how it happened, but it
managed to eject the DVD drive, and the drive got a bit bent out of
shape.  The actual drive piece got slightly snapped out of the tray that
it slides on.  I was able to pop it back in, and it is good as new.

I am very happy with the laptop, I think I am happier with it than all
the $500 1.1ghz laptops I saw advertised at the time she bought it (I
think they all needed a memory upgrade, anyway :p).  The only
disappointment of a used laptop is the battery.  They usually don't hold
much of a charge.  She ended up buying a rebuilt battery for it, which
probably pushed the cost up over $350.

I was actually rather impressed.  I loaded Ubuntu Hoary on it, and it
detected everything in the machine except the modem.  I haven't bothered
to hunt down the winmodem driver, though :p.

We also got her a $10 802.11g card, which is working quite well.  I used
ndiswrapper, because I was lazy.  There are native drivers available for it.

Pat
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