[Herefordshire] Laptop advice

[Ben Stephens]

what type of budget?

Ben


On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:06:44 EST, edwardfw at aol.com <edwardfw at aol.com> wrote:
> 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
>  
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