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  • #21
    Originally posted by Thetargos View Post
    /me points at Emperor Linux and System76 laptops

    /runs
    Let me rephrase my remarks a bit...

    Not at the price points I paid, my friend- I was on a tight budget trying to juggle starting a new contract (that fell through), a divorce, and all while I had a dwindling $6k pool of finances to do it all in while keeping ahold of everything else. I spent more than I really could have justified even when I spent $1100 on the $1800 normal price refurb. System 76 is just now having machines in the low-end of the class of machine at the price point I paid- but they don't have any 17" units. I bought a 17" unit because I needed the screen real estate to do development with. And, Emperor Linux has something in the class of machine I'm using- but the price point of their Rhino versioned Dell machine that's only slightly better than the machine I got is $3000.

    When I got the laptop, only Emperor Linux offered anything in the class I needed, I needed it right THEN (as opposed to waiting a bit for it to ship- I bought my machine brick and mortar at Fry's), and I didn't have a lot of money to buy anything with.

    Now, it's a different story and if I were buying another unit, I'd be considering one of Emperor Linux' offerings instead.
    Last edited by Svartalf; 12 January 2008, 11:57 AM.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by Svartalf View Post
      There IS no solid OpenGL capable laptop on the market offered storefront, and to the large extent, mail order, that DOESN'T have Vista install on it. Honest.
      You can always give back a copy of Vista to retailer and ask for refund. They can't refuse you because they are distributors of Vista and must obey Vista license which says that you can disagree with license and have your money back.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by Mithrandir View Post
        You can always give back a copy of Vista to retailer and ask for refund. They can't refuse you because they are distributors of Vista and must obey Vista license which says that you can disagree with license and have your money back.
        Actually, there was licensing stuff with the HP laptop saying this was NOT the case- you either get to accept the license on Vista or you don't get a warranty and you can't return it no matter what- you either took the laptop as-is, voided the warranty, or returned the WHOLE machine. Now, whether they can make that stick or not remains to be seen, but...

        How they played it was that the damn thing boots with it, doesn't have media TO return (the initial install is in a partition, etc...) so in order to use the machine, you either had to boot the machine and agree to the licensing, or know enough about laptop DVD drives, pop the drive open with a paperclip and boot a Linux install image out of the gate and burn the whole partition table down and start over. Since this was a refurb, I REALLY didn't give a flip about anything past the 30 day return from Fry's ("Warranty? Heh... Let's void that SOB!" is my SOP on that sort of thing usually...).

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        • #24
          You could first boot instead from HD from CD and install linux

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          • #25
            IIRC Microsoft changed their OEMLA to allow OEMs set their own policies regarding Vista returns, what's more, is that I believe this was retroactive to those OEMs still selling machines with XP on them. So at the end of the day, all you can do is hope the OEM will refund you the cost of the OS, or enter the vicious cycle from hell of trying to reject the license to the OEM, who then would tell you "Well, return the machine as well", as the machine itself is also the freaking install media, so this in essence ties the machine to the software in such an evil way that you either take the machine with its OS or no machine at all.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by Kano View Post
              You could first boot instead from HD from CD and install linux
              Uh, Kano, I do believe that's what I just said... I popped open the DVD drive with a paperclip, popped my Feisty disk in the drive, closed it and powered it for the first time and immediately blew away the entire partition table and then dropped Ubuntu and XP (had to have it for verification purposes- app was supposed to be completely cross-platform...) onto it. Ubuntu went on and fired up EVERYTHING. XP was this slow lurching horror of trying to find drivers that sort of worked the machine and vast numbers of reboots and all.

              They went out of their way to keep people from downgrading these things.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by Svartalf View Post
                They went out of their way to keep people from downgrading these things.
                Indeed, they have. My girlfriend has been trying to downgrade to XP on her new Acer machine, but I was unable to find a single driver that would work, especially for the extra keys on the keyboard, and the wireless. If she had it her way, she'd be running Linux + Win2K (on her opinion the best version of Windows she used)

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by Thetargos View Post
                  Indeed, they have. My girlfriend has been trying to downgrade to XP on her new Acer machine, but I was unable to find a single driver that would work, especially for the extra keys on the keyboard, and the wireless. If she had it her way, she'd be running Linux + Win2K (on her opinion the best version of Windows she used)
                  You'll find many people who share that opinion. Win2k --was-- the best windows ever made. It was lite and fast. It just worked. Dont have many drivers, but if you got the right hardware it was perfect.

                  Then XP came along and ruined everything that I had ever enjoyed in computer technology, and so I switched to Linux and discovered something even better.

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                  • #29
                    My girlfriend has been trying to downgrade to XP on her new Acer machine
                    i managed to pull it off on acer 5920 laptop i had to configure for xp, but it was very very difficult, to say the least.

                    funnily enough, knoppix 5.1.1 figured out all the hardware in the machine - i used it to download drivers for the network card, as xp didn't have them

                    and yes, i also second the opinion about win2k being the best windows version to date. it was decent release, just before the excessive bloat started.

                    if i could find an affordable copy with valid licence, i might go for dual-boot.
                    Last edited by yoshi314; 15 January 2008, 10:15 AM.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by duby229 View Post
                      Then XP came along and ruined everything that I had ever enjoyed in computer technology, and so I switched to Linux and discovered something even better.
                      XP was when you had it ruined for you? Heh... All the woes from Chicago did it for me, when I was an Developer Beta (who got the final Alpha cut before beta...) for Windows 95.

                      How do you excuse something that allows the OS to nuke the system from orbit if it got powered down (It would corrupt your boot records all to hell if it got powered down before it was "safe" to turn it off- PERIOD... Thankfully for most people, that little misfeature got removed in one of the final beta cuts...) or being able to BSOD the thing in the middle of the update, corrupting the hell out of the entire system?

                      Linux, even then, though it was clunky to use in at least some ways was vastly better than most of what Windows had to offer back during that era of computing.

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