Linux and off the shelf laptops

[baggyeyes]

My seven yr old PC is behaving badly. It freezes in the middle of a loong yum operation, or even in the middle of switching between text apps.

I could try to get it repaired, but as I have dialup (through Airport), getting updates makes me cranky.

So I'm looking at off the shelf laptops, because I can't afford anything on a credit card.

What kind of laptops do you use, and with what distro? I've heard HP is awful, yet on a Fedora Planet entry, a developer said he'd just installed F15 on a new HP, with no problems. I've also noted others using Acer. Lenovo is out of my league, money-wise.

So, out of a mixture of curiosity and part of my on-going mission to get an idea of what is possible, what do you use in laptops? What distros are you using, and were there any gotchas at first?

Edited to add
I'm mostly curious about what kind of hardware people are using; Laptops DEFINITELY, but if you want to talk about your desktop rig and what you've put into it, go for it!


My computer is a Lenovo 3000 J Series. I have an old Nvidia card GEForce 6200, Old Sound Blaster Live! MP3 that still gives great sound - provided I get rid of Pulseaudio. No wireless, it connects via Ethernet to the Airport, which is controlled by an iMac. (not mine).

Comments

[ratcreature]

I had very limited funds when my last laptop broke, so I was looking at low-end laptops with linux last December. I bought a HP 625 laptop for €400 that came with linux out of the box (you could also get it with windows, but that had less RAM and a smaller harddisk for the same price b/c of the windows cost) and it has been working great so far for my needs (which is basically internet browsing and such, watching DVDs, some GIMP, using emacs and every now and then a word processor, so it's not high end usage). Everything worked right away. Well, I reinstalled an Ubuntu over the trial SuSE Linux version it had out of the box, but I took note in advance of settings and drivers etc. just in case, however Ubuntu 10.10 recognized everything, though it did need some proprietary drivers (for the wireless and I think the video card) and I had to choose a different from default kernel for using all 4GB of my RAM. It also hang once when I chose to download updates during the first installation, but it was fine when I did it in two steps.

The laptop isn't too loud, and it doesn't heat up uncomfortably either. The one downside is that the speakers aren't stereo and not very loud either, though of course you can use earbuds.

[baggyeyes]

I remember your post about it. In Canada, I am not quite sure how many pre-configured with Linux options are available. Most of these (I haven't done a thorough search yet) are online vendors. Not a problem if one has a credit card one can use. I don't, unfortunately.

[ratcreature]

Mine was sold at a regular computer/electronics chain store, not anyone specialized. The linux options were rather limited though.

[baggyeyes]

There are no Linux options where I am - well, maybe one ever-so-slight possibility, but I would have to check them out and ask. Otherwise it's big box stores and ridding myself of Windows.