[GLLUG] New notebook purchase advice: Summary

[Charles Ulrich]

On Monday 25 October 2004 16:00, Brian Hoort wrote:
> There were sites that sell used laptops from companies for $400-800. 
> But the warranty is practically non-existant, and you get a pretty
> damn old machine for the $600 (average).  You can buy a brand new
> Dell for $800-1200 with a rock-solid warranty and support.

That's exactly what I did. Spent weeks hunting and researching every 
laptop store on the net, trying to find a nice well-built but 
affordable laptop that was halfway modern. (I was aiming for at least 
1.2GHz for about $600.) But all I could find were were laptops that 
were either used or were built with hardware that would have been 
considered current five years prior.

I had almost given up until I happened to walk by the TV one day which 
was showing a Dell commercial with one of their low-end laptops that 
cost $700 after rebate. It was certainly a better deal than I'd come 
across yet so I grabbed it. I'm pretty happy with it too. It is 
strictly no-frills, but Linux supports every piece of hardware in it 
(even the winmodem) and it's built quite well. The only negative was 
that it came with a paltry 128MB of memory. After bumping it up to 384, 
the performance was quite a bit better than I had expected to get out 
of a Celeron 2.0GHz.

In general, I'm not much of a Dell fan but they certainly have cornered 
the cheap-but-sturdy-and-well-performing laptop market.

Charles Ulrich
-- 
http://bityard.net