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

[seekingferret]

I bought an HP G62 laptop in January and have been thrilled with its performance. Wireless works great, webcam, audio, ACPI, everything I feared might have problems was great out of the box with Kubuntu. No, I take it back, I had wireless problems whose origin I couldn't identify, and never solved, because I booted it up the next day and the problem was gone.

Right now, my only issue is that the touchpad button jams sometimes. But it was a cheap laptop, so I expected problems like that.

[baggyeyes]

I'll look into it. Thanks!