If you wish to avoid the MS tax, its real hard. I brought the aspire 1355 from DSE, and it works a treat with CollegeLinux, but there are some parts that dont work as well as they should like the battery meter, and video is a pig to get right, Since I dont play games, i went straight to vesa and Im happy. It meets my needs great, but it came with win XP home bundled. My son got an ASUS with geforce video and he dual boots pclinuxos and win XP Pro with ease, a real game machine. my wife has an asus 1400, it all detected fine and worked from the box, but again windows bundled. But I noted that HP have released the Compaq nx5000 bundled with suse linux at linuxworld, so a visit to the NZ hp site and possibly an e-mail about OS free or Linux bundled laptops in this price range may be in order. Not really and answer, but maybe if you ask, they might be able to do something now that they have a stocked solution. BTW what IMAC died ? I'm always on the lookout for macs to rebuild ;-) Just dont tell my wife, another workshop clutter is not on her priority list right now Jonathan Purvis wrote:
My iMac has finally died (instead of booting when switched on, it makes a high-pitched noise and a burning smell), so i'm going to have to buy a new computer. I'm thinking of purchasing a laptop. I'd like one that works with Linux, preferably doesn't come with a bundled version of Microsoft Windows and is under $2000. Other than the ECS A531 (http://www.wlug.org.nz/A531Laptop), are there others that meet my criteria? Is the A531 a good laptop to buy? All i'll be doing is writing programs, web browsing, emulating calculators and playing DVDs (so video is useful too). CPU speed isn't really a factor, anyone who knows me will tell you that i seem to stay away from fast computers. ;)
Thanks,
Jon
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