From: ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld.invalid   
      
   On Wed, 24 Apr 2013, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article   
   , Jim Beard wrote:   
      
   >I dropped by MicroCenter yesterday, and narrowed my choices down   
   >to four or five.  Toshiba, Sony, and Lenovo I will not consider,   
   >and the current Dell keyboard on machines that otherwise would be   
   >of interest do not qualify.  Yeah, I am picky on this one, this   
   >time.  Note that 17.3" screen is mandatory.   
      
   Most of what I'm seeing here is the smaller 15.5" screens. The weekend   
   ads listed just two of the 17.3s from Lenovo and Sony.   
      
   >Candidates:   
      
   The HP dv7-7292nr looks tempting, but may be overpriced.  It's likely   
   to be "over qualified" as well (more capabilities than needed). A ton   
   of RAM is always "nice to have", but we're not even buying i7 desktop   
   systems at work.  HD size - not going out of our way to buy extra size   
   (500-650 GB seems to be the sweet-spot at the moment), but then we try   
   to avoid storing stuff on a laptop drive.  If you need the extra disk   
   space, a 2 TB USB3 external is under a hundred bucks.   
      
   A retired neighbor is a (WW2) history buff, and bought a DVD from the   
   Government Printing Office ("The Army and World War II: Collected   
   Works" GPO Stock 008-029-00550-6 ISBN 978-0-1609-0459-2) for $11.  You   
   may be familiar with "the green books" - this is all 90+ of those, and   
   60+ others - totaling 156 books with 56000 pages, 7500 illustrations   
   and 1700 maps.  They're .pdf files (one per book), and he's using   
   'evince' on his laptop as a reader.  I've actually got 36 of the dead-   
   tree versions, but bought the DVD as well.  It's about 3.13 GB, and   
   the contents easily fit on a $5 SDHC card.  Got a lot of reading to do.   
      
   >I think I will wait until release and choose the machine then, so I   
   >will have the full 2 weeks to take the machine back if I cannot make   
   >some version of Linux work.  (Mageia 3 first choice, fedora core the   
   >last choice;   
      
   Personal choice, but I agree that Fedora is bottom of the list.  Where   
   I work, we _were_ a Red Hat house since 1996 (3.0.3 picasso), but that   
   ended in 2003 when they introduced Fedora - far to cutting edge and   
   unstable.  If you like the Red Hat style, one of the clones of RHEL   
   (CentOS, Scientific, or even Oracle) is a good alternative.   
      
   >dual boot with Windoze desired but if disabling the "secure boot"   
   >and wiping out all traces of M$ from the HD are required to   
   >install Linux I will do that.)   
      
   Secure boot is a relatively minor issue at the moment.  Actually, there   
   was an item on Bugtraq earlier about HP tablets where secure boot could   
   NOT be enabled (a BIOS update fixes that), but even after the update,   
   secure boot is not enabled by default.  What I've done in the past is   
   merely take an image of the drive and then wipe/install.  Others have   
   opened the box, and replaced the hard drive at the same time they're   
   max-ing out the RAM.   
      
           Old guy   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)