[keith smith]

WOW, that does not sound good.

I'll be configuring this laptop with Linux and probably two virtual machines, one a LAMP server for dev and a win VM for testing websites with IE.  I will also use the laptop for watching movies on Crackle, HULU, and DVD.  It is my understanding one cannot watch movies on NetFlix using Linux.

So I will need a fully functional computer - sound, suspend, graphics.....  This should be an interesting experiment.    


 
------------------------
Keith Smith



On Thursday, November 28, 2013 9:50 AM, Michael Butash <mike at butash.net> wrote:
 
As a generic server, they're probably just dandy.  I did that with
an old toshiba laptop, that I used no sound, suspend, graphics, or most any
other bits of the hardware aside from cpu, memory, vesa graphics, bridges
and disk.  I think that was even with fbsd.  Suspend, sound,
having to work around deadlocks on init with grub/lilo for various
acpi/bridge functions otherwise plagued it.
Anything related to acpi/bios function, sound, and graphics have just
historically been problematic, but aside from new device support, has
gotten generally better or at least more sane vs. perpetual moving target
kernel dev's have to hack exceptions around.
I had a friend with a cheap consumer-grade hp for her son, and the power
supply connector broke off within 6 months of use.  After some
whining, I offered to fix it, buying a 3 dollar part off ebay and
disassembling the laptop, motherboard, and soldering a new power connector
on it.  The guts were all pretty janky and flimsy, which didn't help
my opinion of them either.
I'd thought buying an "enterprise-grade" elitebook in 2011, which
amounted to new about $4300 retail worth of laptop at the time (ebay used a
fraction of that ftw), and it was about the buggiest laptop I'd ever
used.  I needed it as at the time 8gb sodimm's were like 4k a piece,
and the elitebook was the only
15" with 4 sodimm slots to get it to 16gb of ram (I needed to launch about 45 virtual cisco ios routers in dynamips for a network sim for a client using a good 13gb of ram, and a laptop for daily use).  Then I was just pissed when hp support's official response was "linux
users aren't enough for us to bother with fixing bios bugs for when windoze
works fine".
I won't even consider them for servers now when given an option.
-mb

On November 28, 2013 8:02:07 AM keith smith
<klsmith2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 4 years ago I bought the cheapest black Friday laptop I could find. 
It was $370 and an HP.  Not much power and not much RAM.  I've used that
laptop as a LAMP server (PHP Dev box) for the past 2 years.  Does just
fine.
>
> 2 years ago I bought a cheap laptop just before Black Friday,  It also
cost $370 and is an HP with more CP and RAM.  I use it for my desktop with
an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor.  
> So far these cheap laptops have given me good service.
>
> I have not had many hardware issues over the years.  I started buying
computers 26 years ago.  I think the reason is I use top shelf power
strips.
>
>
>  
> ------------------------
> Keith Smith


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