I am relatively new to Linux, about 4 years now so i know less than some and
more than others at this point.
I decided on a buy for A Snares come the end of the month, it will replace my
husbands T60 Thinkpad, which I bought for him as a stopgap last June.
Eventually we will all get thinkpenguins.
Prior to that we were running off a 2009 Toshiba Satt and it was a
nightmare from the gate. 3 months in Vista it crashed, recovered with disk, 3
months later BSOD. I installed our windows Xp copy, but low and behold this
model does not support ANY drivers for XP. Only Vista. So, left with nothing
I googled free operating system and found 10.04.
I went through 4 Linux OS's before I found somthing that would work(due to
its proprietary nature) Ultimate edition, and that OS still needed bandaids
here and there and reinstalltions. I moved to keep everything important on a
side drive, due to frequent installs.
Terminal became my best friend
I would loose the wifi card, the graphics, in the end it wasnt even able to
communicate with the dvdrw, this thing went down in flames.
We paid 1K for it out the door in June 2009.
So last year I went on Ebay and bought 3 T60 Thinkpads for our family. One
for each of us. After much time looking at high end dated machines, I found
these the most likely to be freeware compatible.
Then I found MInt.
So over the past year I have looked at the options for freeware laptops (We
will never waste our $ like that again), and thinkpenguin is the only truely
free option at this time that I have found.
I considered this,
If you buy a windows machine, you now lease both hardware(due to the new BIOS
locks) and software.
If you buy freeware machine that has hardware restrictions, essentially you
are leasing the hardware and are subject to security issues as well as OS
compatibility issues.
The options are limited, but the information for making decidions is vast.
Mass produced is ALways the cheapest option. That is basic economics.
Personally I think thinkpenguin is very well priced for what it is. I look
forward our build and delivery from Thinkpenguin.
