[Nottingham] Buying a Laptop

[Garry Saddington]

Michael Leuty wrote:

>On 11/10/05, Edgar <lists at edgar.org.uk> wrote:
>  
>
>>I looking to buy a laptop. Looking at spending 600 to 900 pounds. Does anyone
>>have any recommendations as to where to buy one?  I have very little
>>experience with laptops. Does anyone know where I could get one without an OS
>>at a discount?
>>    
>>
>
>It seems a pretty competitive market, and I don't think there are any
>great bargains available only to the cognoscenti. I recently bought a
>low-end-of-range Toshiba from Currys (not a cool source), which had
>512Mb RAM and built-in wireless for £600. This seemed good value to
>me.
>
>Assuming that you want to run GNU/Linux, the main problem will be
>getting the built-in wireless to work. I loaded SUSE on the Toshiba,
>and found instructions on the Novell site to load ndiswrapper to use
>the Windows driver, which works well. Or you could try taking along
>the latest Ubuntu live CD to test the laptop in the showroom (a tip I
>picked up on this mailing list, can't remember who, sorry).
>
>As far as not paying the Windows tax is concerned, at present it seems
>difficult to save any money this way. I think there is/was a laptop
>available preloaded with Mandriva, but only in France. Things may
>change over the next year or so, but that doesn't help you if you want
>to buy one now.
>
>--
>Michael Leuty
>Nottingham, UK
>
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>
>
>  
>
I recently bought a Compaq R4000 from Curry,s for £850.
It has:
1Gb RAM
64 bit AMD processor
80Gb Hard disk
wireless and a beautiful shiny widescreen and more bells and whistles 
than you could shake a stick at (not all work with Linux but dual 
booting is not a problem). Instructions for Linux on linuxLaptops.
I thought this was a bit of a bargain
regards
Garry