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Inexpensive laptop?
I'm in the market for an inexpensive laptop. I've run Linux on my desktop for years and plan to put Linux on the laptop as well. I live in the USA.
I want it so I can check my email while I'm on vacation or dogsitting at someone else's house, mostly. It would also be nice if it could run Audacity so I can edit audio files while I'm at conventions.
Are there any brands or models I should particularly look for or avoid? I'm tempted to buy a used machine on Craigslist, but also considering buying new. The last "laptop" I owned was a Compaq Portable, so I'm not exactly up on the latest laptop trends and would like some guidance on what to look for or ask about.
I want it so I can check my email while I'm on vacation or dogsitting at someone else's house, mostly. It would also be nice if it could run Audacity so I can edit audio files while I'm at conventions.
Are there any brands or models I should particularly look for or avoid? I'm tempted to buy a used machine on Craigslist, but also considering buying new. The last "laptop" I owned was a Compaq Portable, so I'm not exactly up on the latest laptop trends and would like some guidance on what to look for or ask about.
no subject
The eeepc is tiny and relatively low-powered, but they seem to have stood up to a lot of use. My sister is very hard on computers because she does a lot of gardening and can be a bit clumsy with them. I've tried to get her to put Puppy Linux (specifically Pupeee) on hers, but she seems stuck with slow old Microsoft. On a couple of occasions I showed her how to boot into Puppy via a flash drive to rescue her files when MSWindows stuffed up.
My old girlfriend became entranced by Puppeee when I booted into it from a flash drive on her little netbook. She asked if I would install it permanently for her. In the process of looking for the latest version I found Saluki Puppy, which looks gorgeous, but is a bit slower than Puppy usually is (though still faster than all other Linuxes I've tried, and light years beyond MSWindows).
Laptops and netbooks generally make concessions to power in treading lightly on their batteries. I'd heartily recommend Puppy for such hardware because it is small (about 100MB with all the standard applications) and extremely fast. I have various versions of Puppy running on six of my computers. I'd love to install it on my Android phone, and my thumb-sized Android Mini PC, but I haven't solved that yet. There's not much Linux hope for my old PalmVx or my tiny Arduino Digisparks though. (I'm a hopeless gadget geek.)