I don't know about Dell laptops...  We buy them for our people who need
them, and we've had quite a bit of problems with them.  Keys going bad, bad
cdrom, battery failing after only a couple of months, sketchy problems that
just require a whole replacement from Dell.  If you get one, make sure you
get the 3 year warranty, you'll probably need it.  We have a big stack of
dell notebooks that need some lovin' from the service guy, just haven't
gotten around to calling them on it.  

Haven't had any problems with the sony laptops... unless you drop it once.
Even falling 2 feet is enough to hose a sony laptop.  Probably have 3 or 4
that have been dropped and don't work because of it.

I'd check out epinions.com and see what people say about whatever one you
are thinking of buying.  Unfortunately, their site doesn't work with
konqueror.  It denies you, and if you change your user agent to lie, it
doesn't display the whole page.  

Jay

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Hicks [mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 9:46 PM
> To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Notebook advertised w/o Windows pre-installed
> 
> 
> "Dan Churchill" <churchid at visi.com> wrote:
> >
> > It's an ASUS L8400 PIII 1.0 GHz, 384 MB RAM, 30gig HD, etc. 
>  Don't know how
> > Linux-friendly it is, but the advertised prices are 1999.99 
> with WinME, and
> > 1899.99 with no OS.
> 
> I've done a bit of searching for good laptops..  As much as I 
> want to get
> Linux pre-installed, or no OS on it, I think I'll have to give and get
> Windows -- otherwise my pocketbook will never forgive me.  
> And, well, I
> also have to get Microsoft Works or MS Office, plus an 
> Internet service
> plan, which I don't understand.
> 
> I really want a big display, so I've been taking a look at 
> Dell's Inspiron
> 4100 with Ultra XGA (1600x1200).  Except for the display, you 
> can get a
> very similar system to the above for the same or less money (okay, I'm
> probably going to buy the box with 128MB of RAM, then buy 512MB from
> somewhere else -- one thing that Dell heavily overcharges on..)
> 
> A configuration I figured was decent turned out to be about $1700.  I
> guess I'm being cheap on the warranty though (1 year instead 
> of 3), and
> might change that..
> 
> -- 
>  _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Linux: Just do it.
> / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   
> \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  
> [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | 
> mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
>