[vox] Replacement Laptop

[Karsten M. Self]

on Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 10:36:56AM -0800, Richard S. Crawford (rscrawford at mossroot.com) wrote:
> Well, since my Sony Vaio laptop was stolen, I'm looking to find a
> replacement.  Requirements are a 17" screen (my Vaio had one, and I loved
> it) and able to run Linux.  I've noticed that most laptops these days seem
> to have wireless capability built into them, but I'm not all that
> concerned about it; I have a Linksys card that I was able to get running
> under FC3 with ndiswrapper, and that card was sitting on my desk at home
> when my laptop was stolen.
> 
> Any recommendations?  Right now I'm pondering the HP zd8000, and I've read
> that some people have had pretty good luck with Linux on that model.

New or used, IBM Thinkpads rate very well.  Took the LJ Editor's Choice,
unanimously, to the model.

The advantage new is the support.  I've heard multiple stories from
multiple people about four-day repair.  That's four days from requesting
RMA.  You're airfreighted the shipping box, send it out the following
day, one for repairs, and returned on the fourth.

Service on most of the mainstream consumer HW pretty much sucks.  Since
the actual manufacturing's highly centralized on a *very* small handful
of Taiwanese firms (The Inquirer has run some stories on this at
http://www.theinquirerer.net/) you're pretty much getting the same kit,
modulo some componentry.  Service is the differentiator.

I and friends have been screwed raw with rusty pipes by various no-name
vendors (Arm Computers specifically) and Dell.  Beware small shops which
don't back their own warranty.

IBM seems to make the most GNU/Linux-compatible kit these days too.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    You know, maybe FSF should just rebrand emacs as the hurd and stick
    a fork() in it...
    - Karsten M. Self, on linux-elitists
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