[CLUE-Talk] Laptop Solution

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

A few folks asked me to post a follow-up when I finally bought a
laptop, so I thought I'd give a quick synopsis...

I got a few good suggestions... but, unfortunately, none of them were
really quite what I was looking for. A few folks suggested buying
used equipment, but I really wanted something with a warranty.

I really, really wanted to buy an AMD-based laptop, but every
single laptop with an AMD chip that I looked at (at least any that
were priced under $1,800 or so...) had shared video/system
memory.

I finally settled on a Toshiba Satellite 1415-S105, which I picked
up at Micro Center for $1,099 before tax -- with a $100 mail-in
rebate.

The Toshiba has pretty much all the features I want, and all
of the important stuff works with Linux. Sound, video, Ethernet
all work just fine. It has a Celery, er Celeron, CPU which isn't
my first choice... but it's okay. Comes standard with 256 MB
of RAM, which I plan to upgrade to 512 at the first opportunity.

The search took quite some time, so I was pretty much in the
"I'm going to buy something this week if it kills me" mode by
the time I settled on the Toshiba. If I wasn't, I probably
wouldn't have bought it through Micro Center.

First, they only have a seven day return policy for laptops,
and that's with a 15% fee for returns. When you're spending
more than $1,000, I think that you should have a little time
to decide if something is what you really want without penalty.
Also, if it doesn't do what I want it to do, it's defective
as far as I'm concerned -- that means that if it doesn't run Linux,
it's defective. Unfortunately, Micro Center doesn't see it that
way.

Second, the salesperson was pretty rude when I told them
I wasn't interested in their warranty. I might have been,
but to get a three-year warranty for the laptop AND screen,
it was more than $300 -- that's an f---ing ripoff. Odds are,
I'd never use the warranty, and I shouldn't have to pay almost
a third of the price of the item to get a decent warranty.

If you're shopping for a laptop, I heartily recommend burning
a copy of the latest Knoppix distro to CD and taking it with
you. Insist on booting Knoppix on the machine to see if it's
Linux-compatible at the store. I did, and I left confident
that the Toshiba would work just fine with Linux. I installed
Mandrake 9.1beta3 on it last night, which went on just fine
-- if a little slowly.

All in all, it was a decent deal, and I'm looking forward to
finding a Linux compatible wireless card so I can enjoy
portability...

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
http://www.dissociatedpress.net/