miditek wrote:Pavilion? Yikes! I'm not really a fan of consumer grade laptops or desktops, for that matter. My friends Sudki and Nizar own a local repair shop, and repairing HP Pavilions, CPQ Presario, etc. keep them in business.
My work laptop is a Dell Latitude D830 running OpenSUSE 11, desktop is a Dell Optiplex 755 running XP.
Stealth wrote:I wanted to buy a Toshiba Satellite, but they only had a model with a 17 inch monitor (too big for a laptop). Under normal circumstances, I could have waited for a Toshiba, but I needed a laptop right away because my desktop had died without warning and I had to write two essays and hand them in three days later.
That sucks, I hate it when a machine decides to kick the bucket, and it never seems to happen at a convenient time- if there is such a thing as a convenient time for a computer to croak.
Stealth wrote:In any case, I had no problems with my Pavilion.
That is good news- and I do wish you well with the new system. My opinions on consumer class vs. corporate class machines is based on years of experience, though. I'm not very fond of clones either- but this is from a business, rather than personal use, vantage point. Occasionally, a buyer can luck out and get good use with a consumer (Pavilion, Presario, etc.) system, but there are a lot of repair shops here in my city that having very busy service departments filled with systems that the Geek Squad at Best Buy could not fix.
Stealth wrote: You have to consider the fact that some people have no clue what they are doing with their computers and don't know how to check or remove viruses, spyware, adware, clean the hard drive and the registry, defragment the disk, etc. (you don't have to worry about any of the above in Linux
).
That is correct. However, since you're running a NIX based system, you most likely are much more technically savvy than the average person that is purchasing a Vista-loaded laptop at Circuit City.
NIX is not for the masses, though- not at all. Generally speaking, the masses don't even have a clue of where they saved the file that they just downloaded on a Windows box, - even though it's probably under c:\My Documents so...
Just trying to get ma or pa to find their favorite spaghetti recipe that they just inadvertently saved to /var/logs/ or- gasp actually get it right and save it to /home/user/documents (although they still can't find it), and then the resident expert son (or daughter) trying to explain the finer points of KDE or Gnome could get really interesting- particularly during a phone call when you're hundreds miles from home.
Stealth wrote:Oh and in case you are wondering about my desktop, the hard drive died simply because it had completed its lifetime, not because I screwed up.
The magnetic tape had served its purpose for many years!
Storage manufacturers' marketing departments love to toss around numbers like 30,000 hours MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure), which translates to roughly 3.42 years, or .42 years after the typical three year warranty on the disk runs out!
Stealth wrote:Btw, Dell is not exactly a better choice than Pavilion... They put together different pieces of hardware from different manufacturers. Ok, maybe you have an expensive Dell, but still, an expensive Pavilion can't be worse than an expensive Dell.
Well, most computer manufacturers are very similar in the fact that they are essentially system builders- or assemblers, if you will. Dell, IBM, and HP certainly make their own motherboards, but that's essentially where the actual manufacturing ends.
I suppose that I prefer Dell's motherboards then for laptops and desktops- and probably prefer IBM for servers.
So yeah, none of these guys make their own processors- they come either from Intel or in some cases, AMD. The memory sticks probably come from Micron, Hyundai, Siemens, or Crucial. Hard disks from Seagate, Western Digital, or Quantum.
"Impressive! Most impressive!"
No Windows, no Mac. Linux is the way to go: no viruses, no adware, no spyware, free software, open-source, oh and yes, Ubuntu itself is free. 
