Sly or ty!

[Ty Burna]

Yes Dell is fucking horrible, and I have never to this day convinced my dad to quit purchasing Dell computers. Hell he'll go buy a Dell before he lets me build him a PC and I've upgraded and completely redone his machine multiple times already.

Back to Dell, proprietary bullshit, one of the few companies that actually used RDRAM because they would lose the right to use Intel processors. Well needless to say RDRAM sucked horribly and now it's impossible to find any of it online without paying out the ass for it. Dell's support is horrendous, and the computers are a bit overpriced. The base model prices are somewhat decent but as soon as you start upgrading a bit, it skyrockets.

Myself I usually go for Acer or HP. I'm on my second personal HP laptop at home and it's not failed me once, and my work laptop is an Acer, which is due to get upgraded soon. They'll give me about $1200 to work with so I'm going to get a beefed up rig for that.

 

[Slyfox696]

Myself I usually go for Acer or HP. I'm on my second personal HP laptop at home and it's not failed me once, and my work laptop is an Acer, which is due to get upgraded soon. They'll give me about $1200 to work with so I'm going to get a beefed up rig for that.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...re&category=notebooks&series_name=dm4t_series


I'd start there. I have a similar model (although, I had to buy from Best Buy since it was for school and had to be tax exempt, so I couldn't customize), but it's ultra-thin, and you can beef that sucker up pretty good. And I use the base processor (i5-430M), and it works very well, and I think did well on the benchmark testing from PassMark.

 

[Ty Burna]

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...re&category=notebooks&series_name=dm4t_series


I'd start there. I have a similar model (although, I had to buy from Best Buy since it was for school and had to be tax exempt, so I couldn't customize), but it's ultra-thin, and you can beef that sucker up pretty good. And I use the base processor (i5-430M), and it works very well, and I think did well on the benchmark testing from PassMark.

Not bad, just doing a quick configuration I can get 8 GB RAM, 512 MB video card with HDMI out, 500 GB hard drive, and the base processor and I'm under my laptop allowance.

 

[Slyfox696]

Not bad, just doing a quick configuration I can get 8 GB RAM, 512 MB video card with HDMI out, 500 GB hard drive, and the base processor and I'm under my laptop allowance.

Exactly. And I really like mine. The only bad part is the touchpad is a little tricky sometimes, but if you have a retractable mouse, then it's no problem.

EDIT: I also have only 4 GB of memory in mine, and don't notice any lags at all, even when I'm running a 1 GB XP virtual machine.

 

[Ty Burna]

Exactly. And I really like mine. The only bad part is the touchpad is a little tricky sometimes, but if you have a retractable mouse, then it's no problem.

EDIT: I also have only 4 GB of memory in mine, and don't notice any lags at all, even when I'm running a 1 GB XP virtual machine.

I have a pretty solid wireless mouse that I can use so I'm not too worried about the touchpad. My current laptop is mostly for testing purposes, aka when I'm bored and want to throw Linux kernels on to test. Right now I have a tri-boot setup with Ubuntu, Windows Vista Pro (bleh), and OpenSUSE.

I really like OpenSUSE, easily my favorite Linux distro at the moment.

 

[Slyfox696]

I have a pretty solid wireless mouse that I can use so I'm not too worried about the touchpad. My current laptop is mostly for testing purposes, aka when I'm bored and want to throw Linux kernels on to test. Right now I have a tri-boot setup with Ubuntu, Windows Vista Pro (bleh), and OpenSUSE.

I really like OpenSUSE, easily my favorite Linux distro at the moment.

It really is quite easy to work with, and I think the KDE just looks really good, especially with all the themes that are available. I haven't played with it too much (tried installing to a virtual machine last night, and it was slow and froze a lot...I'm going to try the Virtual PC 2007 32 bit edition and see if that helps), but every time I work with it, I can always find my way around. At school, me and the other tech guy have actually put in three "new" computer labs with NLD 9 (Novell's linux desktop before they bought Suse), running Pentium 3 and 4 processors, with 192-256 RAM. So, we're trying to get kids to move more towards the Linux based OS as well.

Just out of curiosity, why do you tri-boot, instead of virtual machine?

 

[Ty Burna]

It really is quite easy to work with, and I think the KDE just looks really good, especially with all the themes that are available. I haven't played with it too much (tried installing to a virtual machine last night, and it was slow and froze a lot...I'm going to try the Virtual PC 2007 32 bit edition and see if that helps), but every time I work with it, I can always find my way around. At school, me and the other tech guy have actually put in three "new" computer labs with NLD 9 (Novell's linux desktop before they bought Suse), running Pentium 3 and 4 processors, with 192-256 RAM. So, we're trying to get kids to move more towards the Linux based OS as well.

Just out of curiosity, why do you tri-boot, instead of virtual machine?

Novell.....man I remember when I was the student assistant at my high school for the tech department (aka my teachers were idiots and I had to fix everything) they ran the Novell Network Client. 5-6 years ago that was actually some very sound software. I don't think I'd want to have to deal with it at work now, but back then Novell was fantastic.

The reason I have a tri boot is just for kicks mostly, and I'm actually considering just making that a straight OpenSUSE machine in the near future. I do have Sun's (or rather Oracle's) VirtualBox setup on my Desktop with multiple Linux Distro's as well as Microsoft's Virtual Windows XP mode that came with Windows 7. I'm not hurting by any means in the virtual machine area.

 

[Dave]

I'm back.

If I had seen these posts before I had gone out and bought a new laptop, I might have thought twice about getting a Dell. However, for the price it cost me and what I got for my money, I am pretty happy with how things went down. It is a 3GB RAM machine that only cost me £300, which is pretty decent for a machine with that spec.

 

[Slyfox696]

Novell.....man I remember when I was the student assistant at my high school for the tech department (aka my teachers were idiots and I had to fix everything) they ran the Novell Network Client. 5-6 years ago that was actually some very sound software. I don't think I'd want to have to deal with it at work now, but back then Novell was fantastic.

We still run a Novell network. Our main server is Netware, and our two secondary servers are SLES 10. We have a couple of other servers (Fedora for a firewall/proxy and CentOS for Internet filter), but our network is Novell.


We have considered changing though. It's getting hard to find good Novell support around here, and considering Novell is selling off everything, it might be time to migrate to Windows Server.

I'm back.

If I had seen these posts before I had gone out and bought a new laptop, I might have thought twice about getting a Dell. However, for the price it cost me and what I got for my money, I am pretty happy with how things went down. It is a 3GB RAM machine that only cost me £300, which is pretty decent for a machine with that spec.

Dude, I told you not to get a Dell. You should have listened.

Oh well, like Ferbian said, they're not really that bad anymore, I just have long-term hatred against them. Now, you need to throw a Linux on your old laptop and you can have two laptops cranking.