I have been thinking of buying a cheap laptop for web surfing, email, the
odd wordprocessing / spreadsheet (mainly for my wife) and this weekend
Novatech are doing a £250 laptop, no OS, which sounds attractive. I wonder
if anyone has any observations on anything I should look out for and if this
seems a good deal.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbranges.html
The website description does not mention Linux but their email flyer says
"works with Ubuntu". Maybe they are basing their statement on the experience
of one of the customer reviewers who got Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10) to work but not
Hardy (Ubunutu 8.04). Not sure why the later Ubuntu should fail if 7.10
works.
The other customer comment I note mentions "I would always say get a laptop
with at least 1GB of R.A.M.like this if you are using on board graphics as
they take a large chunk of the R.A.M. 512 of R.A.M. is hardly enough" - this
does have 1GB but Ubuntu seems to be getting more ram hungry so I don't want
to cut this too fine if it's going to be a problem with future versions. I
wasn't aware that on board graphics used up main system ram - is this
comment valid?
Apart from the new small notebooks like the Asus eee, are there any other
standard size Linux friendly laptops worth considering in this sort of price
range (say up to £300) ?
Any comments would be appreciated.
Russell
