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On Sat, 2009-11-21 at 09:22 +0000, Neil Winchurst wrote: > John Hansen wrote: > > Our eldest granddaughter is hoping Father Christmas will bring her > > a new laptop. I see Morrisons offer an Emachine with Windows Vista > > for £279 which seem reasonable. However I know very little about > > Vista as I use Kubuntu and Windows XP on my computers. > > > > I wonder if any of you know a source of decent refurbished laptops > > preferably in Devon/Cornwall. > > > > John W Hansen (Bude area) > > > Well this seems to have created a lot of interest. I know that the topic > is cheap laptops, but I thought I would take the opportunity to mention > the Linux Emporium. [1] > > http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk > > They supply many items for the Linux user including laptops. They are > not new, to my knowledge they have been around about 10 years now. > Anyway, re laptops they have a few things going for them - > > 1 The laptops are brand new > 2 Therefore there is the usual year's warranty (return to base). > 3 They come with Linux pre-installed [2] > 4 So, no hassle re the MS licence > > I just thought that some list members might be interested as some of the > advice has been to buy new rather than refurbished. > > Neil Winchurst > > > > [1] Disclaimer: I have absolutely no connection with the Linux Emporium > > [2] Their web site states that Ubuntu Karmic is normally pre installed. > but there are other choices. > > > I bought a Lenovo N500-5 from Linux Emporium about 4 months ago (Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 pre-installed). Delivery was two days from placing order, and customer service/after sales (so far) is excellent. Configuration of the machine was also very good - the only thing I had to tweak was getting it to suspend on closing the lid, rather than just blanking the screen, but this is an individual preference thing - and they even warned me that they had configured it the way they had, in case I just closed the lid and put it in a laptop bag and caused overheating. The only problem is that they do not get the economies of bulk purchase, so it would have been about £100 cheaper to purchase from (say) Amazon with Vista pre-installed, and then reformat and install Linux (even without trying to reclaim the MS License. However, I think it is probably worth that to know that all the hardware has been tested. All in all, my experience with them has been very positive. Incidentally, they formatted the HD with an extended partition (sda4/sda5) for /home, a swap partition - sda3, and two 30GB partitions, one formatted ext3 for Jaunty (sda1 flagged boot), and the other -sda2- marked format "unknown". I would like to install another distro on the second 30GB (possibly debian Lenny 32bit) so I can dual boot, but I am wary of messing up Grub etc. Can anyone on the list point me towards information on how to do this safely? I have looked at the installation instructions on the debian website, but unless I am missing something (or don't have the experience) I can't find what I am looking for. Many thanks Phil Whateley -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html