[ale] Laptop and linux

[Tim Watts]

Thanks for all the feedback, people. At the moment it looks like I'll be 
giving the Emperor folks a call, even though it's a bit more than I had hoped 
to pay. But it will be nice to have a system that works right from the start 
-- my aim is writing code not hacking hardware.

On Tuesday 13 December 2005 10:27, Pat Regan wrote:
> 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