[H-GEN] Recommendation

[Daniel Quinlan]

On Sat, Oct 03, 1998 at 02:14:11PM +1000, Andrew Over wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Oct 1998, Frank Brand wrote:
>
> As far as the warranty situation goes, most of the companies I've looked
> at don't sell an international warranty as standard with their products
> (at least in the US).  It appears to be an optional extra in most cases.
> But reading fine-print _IS_ A Good Thing (tm).

I personally recommend HP, they come with a 3 year international warranty
as standard.  I just recently got a HP Omnibook 5700CT  (it's a runout model)
and I'm exceedingly happy with it <new toy grin>

> > > Ideally, I'd prefer some arrangement that doesn't involve the bundling of
> > > MS [insert POS here], since an MS operating system is likely to remain on
> > > this machine for precisely as long as it takes to reformat the hard drive.
> > 
> > Might be difficult as I believe some manufacturers have agreements with
> > Microsoft that computers *must* be sold with Windows (eg Dell, Gateway -
> > I believe you can not buy their machines without a copy of Windows).

yup, you'll always get windoze with HP laptops they ship from the factory that way.  you _may_ be able to request not to have it, wouldn't hold your breath tho.

> Got any preferred manufacturers?

I work for a HP reseller so I might be a lil' biased, but I've found their gear to be reliable and their warranty service to be very reliable.

the Omnibook 5700 I have is a run out model (it used to be one of the top of the line) and is a really good deal at the moment since you get the CDROM bundled with it. All the hardware in it is supported by Linux.

the newer Omnibooks use the Neomagic chipsets but I believe XBF has a free Xserver for those.

the only thing I haven't got working yet is the hot swapping of the CDROM and floppy drive (works via the BIOS under Win95) but I haven't really fiddled with it all that much yet =)

and the best thing is that Omnibooks use the standard SOMM memory which is made by Kingston, Hepter and others so you don't have to buy proprietary RAM 

anyhow, I'll stop rambling. If you haven't gone to the US by the next HUMBUG meeting I'm taking my Omnibook, if you're interested.

<shameless plug>
Why go all the way to the states when you can buy HP stuff here 
</shameless plug>


--
Daniel Quinlan                     daniel at netwise.net.au
Netwise Australia                  0417 677 377
"Engineering Network Solutions"