Wayne Stallwood wrote:

Somebody posted a link to these machines before (although it wasn't ebuyer)

The main problem with these is that similar money elsewhere will buy you a lot more performance

For a mere £20 more it is possible to configure a laptop on the Dell* site that is based around the PM 1.5Ghz chip, has a DVD RW drive and wireless...chuck the included windows licence in the bin and it's still better value.

No argument about that but of course that's OK for you and me who can install Linux with relative ease. It's just nice to see a major player like eBuyer finaly waking up to preinstalled Linux for the masses.

Ian

On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 23:07 +0000, Ian bell wrote:

No argument about that but of course that's OK for you and me who can install Linux with relative ease. It's just nice to see a major player like eBuyer finaly waking up to preinstalled Linux for the masses.

Agreed...but they still aren't quite getting it.

For a start look at the bundle deal at the bottom of the page offering MS Office SBE 2003 with this machine....Doh ! (No 2003 doesn't work on wine/crossover before you ask) :-)

Actually if I had the cash laying around I'd buy that bundle right now just for the amusement of returning it.

Also putting it on low end machines like this for beginner users causes two problems IMO

It makes Linux look like a "value" option (value in the bad sense of the word)

On a machine of this spec, Full Gnome/KDE eyecandy mode (which is what the target beginner audience will want) is going to run dog slow..not a great first impression.

But by far my biggest problem with this machine is no wireless !! Does anybody honestly ever consider buying a new laptop without wireless these days ? They are missing a trick there (particularly as the most prominent integrated wireless card is perfectly supported in Linux)