Russell Gadd wrote:
> 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
>
Thanks for the comments. I have bought a desktop from Novatech before,
but not a laptop. Looked at the Dell site and found more options here.
I took my wife to PC World to look at various sizes and options and she
decided on a 17 inch widescreen because she thinks it more suited to her
spreadsheet work. Perused the Dell offerings and after some toing and
froing with specs and user opinions gleaned from the web we decided on a
much more expensive laptop the Vostro 1700:
http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/4x_vostro_1700?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd
I have to pretend to be a small business in order to access these
models. May be a bit ott but looks a very solid product and good value
for the spec. Ubuntu forums confirm that it plays nicely with Linux.
Unfortunately still had to pay the Microsoft tax.
One reason for a beefier machine (4G ram) was the potential to use VMs
to play with - would be nice to be able to load the Vista into a VM in
this PC, but I expect this is not in accordance with the licence -
unless somebody knows different. However not really fussed - I will keep
it on the machine since the HDD is big - will use my favourite boot
manager (BootitNG - proprietary not FOSS) which I can use to resize/
alter partitions before loading Ubuntu and possibly other distros later.
Russell
