Barebones laptop/netbooks

10i said:
What happens if I ever need to install Windows on the laptop, let's say I decide to sell it later and the buyer wants Windows on it?
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Use the recovery partition or installation media to reinstall Windows.
 
Mecer are built by Clevo and this is where Alienware and Dell are born. These Clevo's are sold as Sager, Dell, Alienware, Eurocom, etc. There are different levels of perceived quality to meet different rebranding corporate clients' needs. The factory is in Taiwan but Cleco has presence on most continents.

Mecer desktops..........never in my life. Their Clevo-based notebooks are internationally proven to be reliable and enduring. Go for it with confidence.

http://goo.gl/o2wQpb

http://goo.gl/w4hZvm



Another option: I have changed my Macbook Pro's religion to Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca with Cinnamon UI and the conversion was an excellent choice as it is extremely fast, stable and reliable. Also more secure.....the other Mac in the household fell prey to virus infections 41 times now and had to be formatted. Linux in general is virtyally immune to viruses as there are but 38 altogether and these cannot even be executed on much of the 300 distro's. Linux is not safe because of its relatively small footprint, but because of how it works. It has seven layers of protection and the only real threat is the user, not malware. If you don't have money for a new Mac, buy a used one and enjoy the world's best os, Linux Mint, on the best hardware. My machine really is the most pleasant computing experience I ever had.

Final word on Linux security: the recent scare was just that, especially as far as standalone units were concerned. On Mint, my machine was Shellshock-proof even before the bearch was exposed, as my system is up to date always and the test script proved my Bash to be secure. http://goo.gl/hgEplJ
 
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This "Mecer" by Clevo is Ubuntu 14.04LTS certified and will run Linux Mint 17 well. It is decently priced and quality will be average. They are known to be reliable and enduring and this is why the innards fill Dell and Alienware. The casings differ usually and you will not have a tri-metal chassis at the price, but average plastic.

Displays usually also last well. As far as graphics go, always try to get Intel HD 4000 or better, meaning choosing the right Ivy Bridge or Haswell CPU. The Haswells will let your battery last longer between recharges. It is possible that an i7 Quad may even have Iris Pro graphics which is HD 5200+. It depends upon which CPU is added. It is good to do some research on CPU's for that reason.

If you are not into 3D design or extreme heavy gaming, rather use i5 as it will save you money while you do not lose out on performance. Browsing, doing emails or office jobs mainly is where i7 is overkill, really. The i7 will use only one core for this and it is wasting money. Use a fast 6GB/s drive before you buy too fast a CPU. Linux also won't really need more than 4GB RAM. If you send 1GB to RAM, the remaining 3GB may never even be fully utilised, as I have seen in my own experience.

Thanks, garyc, for that interesting Phoronix benchmark test. It confirmed my perceptions.
 
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Windows Tax

Why are we putting up with vendors forcing us to pay Windows Tax? How about this perspective from the court?

One can also buy barebone systems sans OS or do as I did and installed Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca on my Macbook Pro. The Mac is much faster than with OS X and also more stable and reliable. Having the best hardware and software combined was not cheap, but the 2012-model i5 2.5GHz Ivy Bridge with 4GB RAM and 1TB HDD was bought at R10k which seemed fair to me. It is just so much better engineered than the HP and Acer that had constant problems with USB ports that functioned randomly, if at all, or sound jacks that just were flimsy and hardly ever worked. The backlit keyboard is a boon when working at night.

I was looking at a Dell XPS with a backlit keyboard but it was much more expensive than the used MBP. The thing is that, when we buy new, we pay for that Windows which we will never use. Has anyone in South Africa ever stood up against a vendor? Why are we forced to buy software we don't want or need?
 
Because you're in the minority.

Dell and a few others like HP have tried selling PCs without Windows and with Linux, but sales didn't justify it.
 
Chevron said:
Because you're in the minority.

Dell and a few others like HP have tried selling PCs without Windows and with Linux, but sales didn't justify it.
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Ubuntu alone, not counting other distro's, shipped pre-installed on 30 million PC's over the past 18-24 months alone. The world is changing and some will be left behind. The third world is taking to Linux en masse, just as they were the driving force behind Android (which is Linux!) and see where that had taken Android! Linux will follow suit, perhaps in a bit smaller way, simply because Android (Linux!) will be THE operating system of the future, powering low-power ARM-based computers and mobile devices.

What minority will Linux users be in a decade from now? Read here and here.
 
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ginggs said:
Obfuscated links look like spam to me.
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Does this make you feel more content? http://www.comx-computers.co.za/Buy-Notebooks-Laptops-W970SUW-Mecer-W970SUW-Barebone-lp-92493.php To me, pasting a link in like this looks tatty. The notebook, however, is Ubuntu 14.04LTS certified (most likely under one of its many branded names and not Mecer) and it offers a fair variety of configuration options. Mostly, modern laptops are over specified by default, as far as Linux goes, unless you are a heavy gamer or graphics designer.

In the past, I had used various old laptops and all of them were reasonably sufficient in terms of performance. Duties were limited to heavy browsing (3 browsers each with up to 40+ tabs), Thunderbird with six POP3 accounts and off-line mail, various large spreadsheet in LibreCalc and that is about it. Various distro's and many versions of each were tested for office use. AriOS, PCLinuxOS, PearOS, ZorinOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, UltimateOS, etc. LMDE/Xfce/Cinnamon/KDE.

With the exception of the KDE desktop, all ran well. KDE required better graphics than most. Instead of just looking at bying a new barebone system, a used Thinkpad or Dell XPS or similar could serve you well, but best is not to buy lesser quality second-hand. Acer and HP had proven to be unreliable in this department.

My two very best platforms were the IBM Thinkpad T61p Core2Duo with 3GB DDR and a 2012 MacbookPro i5 2.5Ghz. The Thinkpad cost me about R3k three years ago and really served me well. Although I prefer its trackpoint over touchpad, I never used its built-in input devices as I always use an external keyboard and mouse. This allows me to place the laptop at eye level.

On the Macbook, though, I am using its backlit keyboard which I find to be very convenient.

Anyone reading here, maybe a few years from now, may still benefit from knowing that one does not have to fork out a fortune in buying new, as warranties are not honoured when Linux is installed. This is only because the support technicians lack the skills. Buy good quality; I have seen many good deals on Gumtree and even bought a few.

Dell: I had a little Inspiron with i3 Sandy Bridge and just 2GB RAM. It really did exceedingly well and was cheap brand new, I think below R5k, if I remember correctly, in 2012.
 
HavocXphere said:
For that I'd seriously consider going for a 2nd hand corporate laptop.

e.g. At my employer they're busy throwing out everything that isn't cutting edge i7 with SSD. Meaning they're dumping i5s with HDDs onto the market. Those get "refurbished" and sold for 5k instead of the 4k employees can buy them at.

If you're looking to buy commercially...the notebook company provides a decent baseline for your shopping investigations.

Also...for laptops...cutting corners on hardware and then rocking an SSD works surprisingly well on pure perceived experience.
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Hamster, did you get your lappy? What did you buy? Share your experience with us.

HavocXphere, your advice is excellent. Slightly off the topic, but you did mention SSD. How well does Linux work on SSD? I have read a few comments where the authors vowed never to use it with Linux. I cannot see why, though. If one does not use swap and Linux hardly ever needs that - own experience - there would not be that many read/write activity going on. Much less so than with Windows, I would think. That is just an opinion as I am not educated in this. Ext 4 file system a problem somehow? YET a credible geek suggested to someone to use a 64GB fast SSD (cheap) as Linux needs little real estate.
 
Cool. I'd imagine anything with Trim support should be fine...haven't researched it but taking a wild guess *nix should support it just fine. Personally I'd go for ext3 though...

With an SSD its going to be fast one way or the other so I'd rather go for a filesystem that is tried and tested and has lots of tools etc.

Don't worry about the writes...those things can take crazy amounts of writes before they bomb so people just need to chill on that front.
 
MacLindroid said:
The notebook, however, is Ubuntu 14.04LTS certified (most likely under one of its many branded names and not Mecer) and it offers a fair variety of configuration options.
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Certified by whom? Is is certified by the manufacturer that it will run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, or is it certified by Canonical that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will run on it?
 
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