Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
[...]
vendor to do the setup & support, and they don't say if that compares
economically to, say, paying Joe to do that, only that it saves them time
themselves. Sure, if I had that budget, I'd pay Joe and RGB to come
and work
for me and I would have more time for other things.
I sure hope that it is a really big budget then, right Joe? ;-)
I could say we are cheap, but it could be misread ... :^
[...]
The problem is that this is such a crazy rapidly changing field. For
example, I've been happy with two generations of Dell, but I know people
who have bought Dells on all three sides of mine and been unhappy. With
one of my Dell laptops I started out unhappy and then rapidly became
happy as a driver was added in real time (thanks to FC!) We've also got
a much newer Toshiba in the house. The Toshiba, also, started out
unhappy (with FC unable to install) and then became happy (with it
installing perfectly and transparently) with the next FC that came
along.
FC2 runs great on the laptop I bought 5 years ago. Not a fast machine,
not enough ram, but FC2 did a good job with it.
So far, FC and Ubuntu have been my favorites (in terms of features) on
the laptops, and Ubuntu IMO edges (no pun) FC in
usability/supportability. SuSE has been slowly and surely become
monotonically more maddening since 9.3.
Yeah, gonna have to get some more customers to be able to afford th
Toshibas to my limited experience tend to work better with Linux than
with Windows, partly because Toshiba installs its own layer of Toshiba
specific crap underneath Windows to deal with various things Windows has
sucked at, but MS doesn't willingly relinquish control of things like
the wireless network, and then along comes your ISP with their own
package (invented for the same reasons) and suddenly you have three
different pieces of software trying to run the wireless network, each
[tangent /]
Sitting in Detroit Metro airport (a planes/trains/automobiles day,
flying to Ithaca, wound up in Syracuse driving to Ithaca), I booted my
laptop into windows, and found some nice open wireless sites. Had to
register, and they wanted to download an executable to my laptop to run
in order to access the network.
Uh huh.
thinking it is the only one, one of which is based on low level firmware
drivers that is really difficult to turn off, one of which is built into
the core OS and really difficult to turn off, and one of which should
probably never have been installed but had to be in order to facilitate
accessing your ISP and now are -- really difficult to turn off, at least
without changing ISPs or learning how to connect without using their
tools.
Long long ago, I made the mistake of attempting to use the Verizon
wireless card for my laptop. Installed the drivers. To this day I
cannot un-install them without wiping windows.
[...]
The really important thing is to get that 3+ year onsite service
contract, whoever you buy from. Laptops are easy to break and break
often, and one tends to rely on them even more than desktops.
Yeah. The 3 year warranty (next day replacement) is one of the few
warranties/support contracts that is actually worth the price.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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