Suggestions for laptop purchase for Fedora Core 3?

[David A. Wheeler]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Have you looked at http://www.laclinux.com/en/Laptop?

Again, the premium (from my point of view) is steep: about $600+.

Their stuff costs $1400-$1850 for 15.4" display, 512M RAM,
and a 40GB drive.  Presumably I'd add about $150 to bump
up the latter to 1G RAM & 80G HD (their largest). Add another
~$100 for a wireless card, so we're talking $1650-2100
(approximate).  I'd like to dual-boot Windows, that'll cost
$130 more, so it's now easily $1780-$2230.  (I'm doing this
from memory after looking at drop-down memories, so
this may be a little off, but the basic point's right).

Now let's do the contrast, and walk to the local computer store.
HP Pavilion zv6015us with 15.4", 1G RAM, and 100G HD
(larger) with all those things is $1200 around here,
and I can walk home with it.  And it has a faster processor.
Oh, and the wireless, network, and modem are internal, so they
don't use any PCI slots, in contrast to laclinux.

Bottom line: About a $600+ premium.  For a no-name.  Ouch.

An HP Pavilion with 17" screen (much bigger) is $1850...
and I like the big screen.  If I'm going to spend more $$,
I'd rather spend it on actual hardware improvements.
Some $$ on service is fine, but now we're talking 33%-50% of
the cost of the product!

--- David A. Wheeler