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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Edward !</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thats an awful big budget for what you say you want
to do ! I run an old Dell Pentium2 machine with a clean Win98 on its own
partition with another partition for applications and windows files. On another
partiotion I have a Fedora Core 1 installation which I am using to learn the
rudiments of linux. All my USB2 peripherals run off a 4 port PCMCIA card, as
does the modem etc.The Dell has a cold swappable floppy or cd rom bay, but there
is a cable to run a floppy off the printer port, and it is bootable. Finally it
is a doddle to get a spare hard drive chassis and swap drives at will( again
cold only). I cannot claim that I have had all this peripheral kit working under
Linux, but hey you have to apply yourself somewhere!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I recommend a visit to MWPC in Widemarsh St for
re-con laptops and spares of all sorts at very reasonable money. Again I promise
you, you dont have to spend more than a fraction of your stated budget to get a
laptop that will do your asking !</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Best of Luck</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Pete H@</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>