[sclug] Recommendation for Laptop for Linux

[Neil Haughton]

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Keith Edmunds <kae at midnighthax.com>
> To: sclug at sclug.org.uk
> Cc:
> Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2014 20:13:13 +0000
> Subject: Re: [sclug] Recommendation for Laptop for Linux
> On Sat, 06 Dec 2014 19:55:51 +0000, olivier.lauret at googlemail.com said:
>
> > Linux Emporium website doesn't seem to work anymore. I cannot see any
> > items.
>
> The Linux Emporium is one of the sad stories of Linux in the UK. They
> *used* to be really, really good. Then the original owner, a guy called
> John Winters, sold the business. No criticism of him for doing so (quite
> the opposite: well done), but it went rapidly and continuously downhill
> from that point. I stopped buying from them soon after John sold up (around
> 2004 or so, I think).
>

That's a shame. You wonder why someone would buy a viable business and then
let it go downhill. Maybe it was 'really good' for the customer but not
profitable.

FWIW I have had good experiences with Zoomstorm. I bought a Zoomstorm
machine sans OS for work as a server and installed W7 on it, and it just
sits there and works 24x7. I have an OS-free desktop machine from them at
home which came with 8GB memory and a 1TB near-silent hard drive and I have
installed an SSD and several successive Mint versions (17 now) on that, and
it "just works" too. Fast, too - boot to logged-in in a few tens of
seconds. My only complaint is that I can't 'see' various cell phones,
cameras or non-Linux music players connected directly via USB. Flash
drives, memory cards and other USB devices such as external hard drives
have no problem though. That's probably a general Linux problem, not the
hardware itself, I'm guessing.

Neil.