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@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