[lug] Cheap laptop for a neophyte

[Ken Weinert]

Elyse M. Grasso wrote:
> My own hardware is much higher end. Does anyone have suggestions about 
> machines I can point her toward? Or away from?
I have an HP dv9000 series that was just a little over that - but there 
are others in the series that would fit in her budget.

I've been well pleased with it, but I will mention two things:

1) it's been in for service once after 6 months - failed to boot, turns 
out it was bad memory. In this case I had an extremely good customer 
service experience.

2) I run Ubuntu and I've one persistent issue during boot up. It 
*always* hangs and takes a quick click of the power button to get it to 
move. It's during the POST phase and when it does continue booting I get 
some sort of message about a USB port that's not responding. I don't 
know if this is an issue with this particular box or a general HP/Ubuntu 
issue.

It doesn't bother me as I don't really reboot that much and I understand 
how to get by it, but it could be an issue, depending on tolerance 
levels and experience.

-- 
Ken Weinert