Sorry to hear about your loss!!
18 months ago I converted to laptops to do my LAMP dev. It reduces heat in my home office. I've learned a couple things through the process.
One of my laptops was a Black Friday special from 3.5 years ago. It has an AMD single core with 3Gb of RAM. I use it as a LAMP server. The other was bought just before Black Friday a year and a half ago. It is a dual core AMD with 4Gb of RAM.
I paid $370 for each. Not bad.
From this experience here is my suggestion:
A Chrome book will cost about $300. It is low power.
For about $100 more you can get a Dell with a 17" screen and and entry level third gen i3. That is like twice the machine. It will have the power to do just about anything you need to do.
One of the things I would consider is virtualization. Even though you think you may not want to use these laptops for work, it could happen. So you will want to have IE available (considering you will install Linux) to ensure your webpages render well in IE as well as FF or some other browser.
Here is an i3 with a 17" screen and Win7 for 499.00. Do the chat thing with a rep and they might give you $25 or $30 off to motivate you.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops.aspx?ref=tile2#!facets=55846~0~14833549,228279~0~14814752&p=1
Here is a 15.6" for $449 and you might get it closer to $400 by chatting with customer service. They always give me a discount when I chat with customer service.
These two have much more power than my laptops and I use mine daily for LAMP dev.
Just as a side note, I'm moving away from AMD. I do not think AMD CPU's are as good as Intel's.
------------------------
Keith Smith
--- On Sun, 7/7/13, Betty I <
webcanine@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Betty I <
webcanine@gmail.com>
Subject: Yarnell fire and new computer
To:
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
Date: Sunday, July 7, 2013, 3:07 PM
Hi all;
(I used to be the lady that was 'nice penguin @ webcanine dot com' but had to change my email so now I have this one.)
We lost our house in Yarnell to the fire last weekend and are staying in Phoenix. But you guys have always been good for information on computer stuff in general, so i thought i'd ask here first.
We have good insurance, and it is going to cover replacement cost for our computers up there. They were old, pentium III's that i had put ubuntu on and were great desktops. but i am thinking that since we don't do a lot of computer intense work up there, just surf online and read emails, that maybe it would be better to just get laptops. Then i was thinking maybe of getting a chromebook instead of a 'regular' laptop; but my son said that those are all 'cloud ' based.
But does that mean that they have no functionality if we're not online?
What do you guys think?
I have time, since it's going to take about 4 months to get a new manufactured home up there :(
also, OT, i did just finish an html class and made my final project a few webpages with photos of the place and the fire stuff. of course, we haven't been allowed back up there but we're hoping for early this week.
http://ipmarizona.com/eclass/before.html
well, thanks for any ideas.
betty i
--
webcanine.com
information for people
who care for dogs
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