Re: [coLinux-users] Are there any better/worse laptops for colinux

[Eric S. J. <es...@ha...>]

james pruett wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Are there any better/worse laptops for colinux?
> Sorry to post this here, but laptops are expensive.
> HP,Vista,Dell, issues?

I have a negative recommendation for Acer.  I have a TravelMate 8200 and while 
the hardware and display are really nice, they have two huge negatives which 
means I'll never purchase one again.  The smaller of the two is the amount of 
heat it generates.  It's on the right-hand side and it's quite toasty when 
running a Linux virtual machine or speech recognition.  The biggest negative, 
however, is that the technical support cannot fog a mirror on a good day.  I 
have had persistent problems with Bluetooth which they cannot resolve.  Smaller 
negatives include never updating device drivers [1], being told (at $2.72 per 
minute) to scrub my disk, reinstall Windows and then after installing each 
application, try to cause the Bluetooth failure.  Note, I use a lot of 
applications so this suggestion would cost me at least a couple of weeks of down 
time.  And then the person says, "oh, that wouldn't do you any good because if 
an application makes Bluetooth go bad, it would only do it again."  even though 
I told them that the problem is an intermittent one and I could not afford the 
downtime,, they still kept trying to figure out how to make the reinstall 
process work.

Nice hardware, abysmal, worse than Dell support.  The only way I would purchase 
an Acer machine is if I was going to scrub the disk and install Linux from the 
first moment I popped it out of the box.

[1] what I mean by never updating drivers is that they never fix any bugs and 
then publish the fixes for your laptop.



-- 
Speech-recognition in use.  It makes mistakes, I correct some.