[Herefordshire] Laptop advice

[EdwardFW at aol.com]

Greetings to all

I have long wanted to have a go with Linux. Windows has kept me too busy. It 
is now so bad I have to act (To be fair Windows 98SE was not that bad for a 
good while, the problems became bad when it had to cope with too much hardware 
strung on to it and too much software trying to talk to it at the same time.)

I don’t want anyone to go to much trouble as it’s for me to chase up 
details. But I would be grateful for brief ideas of suitable makes and model of 
laptop to get to play with and then hopefully work on. Also ones to avoid

Key concepts:

Basically suitable for small business use I have in mind SUSE 9, KDE, and 
Open Office. Some modest editing of bitmaps and jpegs

Not too fancy and modern to work with Win98SE - in case. Perhaps the key 
restriction here would be hard drive not over 40 MB. At a push I should be able to 
buy one that size and stick it in if needed

As many drives in it as possible. Doesn’t matter how big and heavy it is. 
Brilliant if take two hard drives at once and/or  C:\   drive can easily be 
swapped for an alternative C:\ drive  (cartridge system) or at least it is possible 
to get the hard drive out and another in with a modest amount of work

I absolutely must have an old fashioned floppy disk drive in it or at least 
connected in the traditional way (don’t cut me off from the possibility of a 
DOS boot disk!)

Can take a proper keyboard by PS/2 or similar

USB 2

One serial and one parallel port nice

Cardbus? - the 32 bit things that go in a slot - provision for one of these

Not too old and slow re RAM and CPU so can take at least say 192 MB RAM, and 
at least 500 MHz, preferably plenty more of each

Get by with 8 GB hdd (would I? - I plan to add bulk back-up via the USB2), 
more no problem

A good screen with fine resolution that is pretty easy on the eyes but no 
need for enormous size or large videos at speed. Main purpose word processing

Happy to buy new or secondhand but want quality or at least what the IT world 
calls quality 

Enough of them made so that if all goes well I have a chance of getting 
another one or two later to clone and have around for spares. Or one that uses 
easily available parts. (And if there are plenty of them about others will have 
come across any installation etc. problems.)

Perhaps someone even has something near enough suitable to sell because they 
wish to upgrade?

Repeat - no need to do the whole job for me but if you know of a couple of 
makes and models to go for I would be most grateful 

Regards, Edward Fowler-Wright
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/herefordshire/attachments/20041201/992c6533/attachment.html