Cheap new Linux laptop advice?

[Carruth, Rusty]

Personally, 4G is not QUITE enough RAM.  (Disclaimer - I have 16G on both my personal laptop and my work laptop.  I used to have 4G on my work laptop, bah humbug)

My wife’s laptop has 4G, and has to kill off firefox every once in a while due to its apparent memory leak.  However, I’ve got 16 G at work running windows, and every few days *I* have to kill my firefox because it is taking around 14G (or at least guess which window is causing the leak)….

(Ok, yes, I’m a heavy user.  I confess.  (Is there a group for that?) )

We’re using Lenovo at work, and a T410 worked fine (as fine as it can with only 4G - but all the hardware worked ok as I remember).  4G max RAM, I think, but I think there’s a T420 or something that takes more RAM.

I’ve had relatively good luck in the old days with Dell (Inspiron 8000 or something like that?), but YMMV.

The only laptops I’ve got personal experience that I know work fine (again, ignoring memory) are:

My wife’s, model and so forth forgotten.  If you care I can go look

My personal Alienware, which is WAY outside the price range.  The only real issue with it was:  you need a recent distro (Mint 17 didn’t work well, Mint 18 worked fine).

Lenovo ThinkPad T410.  Used with an older Mint, as I remember everything worked.

I just realized that I don’t think I’ve run Linux on my ThinkPad, so ‘never mind’ on that one, sorry.



Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2018 2:59 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Cheap new Linux laptop advice?

A friend needs a cheap Linux laptop for light duty business work:
  Libre Office, printing via USB connection, WIFI, email, and light browsing.

His business (piano tuning) hangs on this.
He would like the provider to be established with a decent reputation, whether the computer is new or refurbished.

His cap is $400 but he would prefer closer to $200 . . .

Refurbish? In past discussions here, I’ve seen references in the past of a good refurb provider in town. How well established are they, what’s their batting average?

New? I see:

 At Amazon:
*Dell Inspiron at Amazon for $205, 11.6" HD Celeron N3060,
    4GB RAM32 eMMC HDD.
*ASUS VivoBook E203NA-YS03 $199, 11.6” Featherweight design
    Intel Dual-Core Celeron N3350 2.4GHz processor,
    4GB DDR3 RAM, 64GB EMMC Storage, App based Windows 10 S

At Fry’s Electronics:
* HP 14-ax030nr, 14" Stream Laptop With Intel Celeron N3060 Processor,
    4GB Memory, 64GB eMMC and Windows 10

Chromebook? I see Chromebooks under $250.
* Scrub & convert to Linux?
* USB ports to run a printer and external backup disk?
* Storage to run Libre writer + mail client + light surfing?

He doesn’t want to entrust all his data to Google, and is happy with Linux.

Any specific suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks,
Victor





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