Laptop for engineering without OS

rickman wrote, On 04.07.2008 09:00:

At least here in Germany you can buy notebooks with "FreeDOS" operating system even from HP / IBM / Asus etc.

You should have similar vendors in your country.

Regards, Rolf.

Here's a question - Why do you need to buy a new one? What about dellauctions.com, or IBM's eBay auctions, or the refurb merchandise link on toshibadirect.com, etc etc?

I don't want to get into flamewars about one vendor or another, but...

I do a lot of business with TigerDirect. I just checked, and they still sell XP Pro laptops. Some are off-lease, some are new.

I'm betting that their are other vendors as well.

RB

... snip ...

Then don't recommend Tiger. They have an evil reputation.

--
 [mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) 
 [page]: 
            Try the download section.

I've used them for a long time, buying equipment for my kids' school (I'm the volunteer Sysadmin) and personal use. I've probably spent $10K and had exactly one problem with a desktop computer. I called and they shipped a replacement computer. It got there faster than the original. Within the last month I bought 23 512K SODIMMs for laptop upgrades. They arrived in two days and all worked.

RB

Only for you Mother Falconer.

I have used them for years, never had a problem.

donald

I have to say I am not impressed with Tiger. I looked at the laptops and found that they only categorize based on price, brand or CPU. With 15 pages of laptops it is very hard to find just the ones running XP. Further the selection of XP machines is rather limited, just like the other sites I found, Toshiba and Lenovo. Someone suggested the off-lease (otherwise know as *used*) laptops. I can get one with a Celeron M, which is I don't know how many years old, only half a gig of RAM and 40 GB of HD for $420. That is only a couple of bucks less than the new machines with better everything!!!

Tiger does have a lot of stuff, but they don't make it easy to find. It's too bad I can't build my own laptop like I can a desktop. I may try to find one of those really small case desktops, but so far all the ones I could find are preconfigured with an OS... Vista. I haven't found a barebones case like that. Maybe I need to make my own. How hard can it be to bend a little sheet metal? I have a friend who has a machine shop in his garage and I could build pretty much any sort of case I want, and I mean *any* sort of case. Another friend built a PC in a beer case... I think it was an MGD PC. :^P

Rick

You're really casting blame where it doesn't belong. The situation is very simple: Microsoft wants to book all the Vista sales it can in order to obfuscate the true uptake rate of Vista vs XP and protect itself against major competitors MacOS and Linux. Therefore it decided to stop selling Windows XP licenses. The only Windows on sale now is Vista, and there is a little fine print saying that you can downgrade to XP if you wish. And this is 100% Microsoft's fault, not Sony's or Dell's or Tiger Direct's.

Any fullsize laptop or desktop you see in any catalog preloaded with XP is either refurbished or new old stock; i.e. used or leftovers. You won't find the $499 "back to school" special laptops with XP on them.

Your only choices are therefore to select from the limited array of "new old stock" computers that were preloaded by the OEM with Windows XP (deal with the price), or buy a used machine (shop around; I bought a ThinkPad R51, 1.6GHz/WiFi/40GB/1GB/combo for $175), or buy a Vista machine and downgrade it one way or another. Plenty of XP retail boxed editions are available on eBay, Craigslist et al.

You may also want to consider one of the ultraportable machines that fall into Microsoft's category where XP is still allowable (but you'll complain that these are expensive and slow and too small and maybe the wrong color and smell bad).

Or of course there's the piracy route. Enjoy.

There's nothing shameful in buying a used machine, though. Most of my computer equipment is purchased used; the only new computer in my office is my MacBook. (Well, "new" = "1 year old but I bought it brand new").

Do a web search for "whitebox computer" or "whitebook computer". A couple of years ago there was great interest in selling bare laptops for the user to assemble; I think it's died down but there's still a market for small OEMs to 'make' laptops from semi-standard components.

Also, check out System76. They're one of the aforementioned small OEMs that integrate an Asus whitebook into a full system and load Ubuntu linux on it. The best part is that they support some of the unique bits of the laptop that Ubuntu doesn't -- when you get a System76 machine it comes with their custom drivers, which they seem to be pretty good about keeping updated.

There prices are surely a bit higher than bare parts from Asus, and way higher than a good used or refurbed machine, but my Gazelle laptop has worked just right out of the box, the only problems I've had with it have been self-induced, and their service department has been quite good about supporting me.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Do you need to implement control loops in software?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

I would consider used equipment, but I want something that will last as my needs for processor speed and especially memory grow. 1 GB is not enough on my desktop machine currently, so I don't know why it would suffice in a laptop. It is not cost effective to buy a machine only to supe it up with memory and hard drive. I'm better off paying for a new machine.

The idea of buying a machine with Vista (pay MS for it) and then buying an older versions of XP or 2000 (and paying MS once again) really rankles me. I am at a point where I am willing to consider running linux although I understand that it will have a painful learning curve and there are any number of programs that won't run under it. Still, I have my old windows machines so Linux may work for me.

As to the small form factor machines having a smell... I don't know how you can pick out day old fish in a skunk's nest! I am saying that this whole thing stinks to high heaven. I just hope I haven't offended any skunks by comparing them to MS. :^o

Rick

But there is no machine that will meet that requirement indefinitely. If your needs are so gargantuan (I should point out that my Fortune

100 company has me on a five-year-old, 2GHz single-core machine with 768MB RAM, and it's MORE than enough, and no machine I personally own has more than 1GB of RAM) then you're at best getting two years life out of a new machine instead of one year out of a used one. This is trebly applicable to laptops, which are not very upgradable.

Is this intended to be a desktop replacement? (I operate entirely off laptops, btw. I have a machine with a big external USB drive that I use as a fileserver, and I keep only what I'm working on on the laptop's hard drive).

The learning curve will be particularly painful if you choose a bleeding-edge brand new machine. You'll have a much easier time with Linux if you buy hardware that's a little behind the crest of the wave, because there will be much better FOSS driver support.

Since a c.a.e poster pointed me to VirtualBox, I've moved 100% of my development effort into that environment, running within MacOS on my MacBook (2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 120Gb HDD, 1GB RAM). It's just amazingly good. Previously I had tried and abandoned all hope of using my various JTAG hardware within emulation, because of USB incompatibilities. VirtualBox has eaten everything I threw at it, both in MacOS and in Linux.

Inside the emulated box, I'm using a Windows XP license salvaged off a defunct laptop. When I see people throw out computers, I also generally try to salvage the CoA's if they're still on the case; I take the whole case, salvage any useful bits, and scrape off the sticker to be archived. Once I had to reactivate a license of this type over the phone; I explained that the guts of the machine had been changed entirely (which is true) and there wasn't a problem activating it.

I do have a Toshiba convertible/tablet machine that I use to take handwritten notes. I also have an Eee 2G Surf, but really I just bought it because it is such a fun toy. It's so cool to be in a bar and whip out this pocket-sized PC, hitch a ride on the bar's WiFi [I have no idea...] and telnet into a machine to check something or demo something to the people I'm talking to.

On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 00:00:11 -0700 (PDT), rickman wrote in comp.arch.embedded:

You are mistaken, Dell still sells laptops with XP. Try this page:

They have what they call Vista Business Downgrade service. The "business" versions of XP come with downgrade rights to XP Pro. What they actually sell is the machine with XP installed and running, and both XP and Vista installation media.

Since the OEM price for Vista to manufacturers like Dell is the same as XP was, you can look at it like this. You pay the price for XP Pro (installed and ready to run) and get a Vista Business upgrade disk, for the remote possibility that you would ever want to, for free.

Starts at $498.00:

And there are higher cost, higher featured models as well.

You don't actually have to prove that you own a business to buy online from Dell small business.

--
Jack Klein
Home: http://JK-Technology.Com
FAQs for
comp.lang.c http://c-faq.com/
comp.lang.c++ http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++
http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/docs/FAQ-acllc.html

I think you are mistaken. What you are calling "downgrade rights", Dell calls "Windows Vista Bonus". You pay ***extra*** for this. It may be the same price as the "business" versions of Vista, but it is still an increase from the base price and an increase from the price with *just* XP. The ***LAST*** thing I want to do is to reward MS for putting out a crappy OS by paying them for both the old and the new OS.

I am very familiar with Dell and am a "small business" customer. That is why I know that I can't buy a machine with XP without paying for Vista as well.

Thanks for pointing this out though. I expect there are others who are not familiar with how the "downgrade" program works.

Rick

After many years (about 8 as far as I can make out) I have just changed my old Dell Inspiron for a new Dell Inspiron 1525 with 2Gb memory, 120Gb HDD, DVD read/write, Ethernet and Wifi in a case colour of my choosing. Vista was pre-loaded on the machine but I wiped that in favour of Mandriva Linux. It makes this machine seem to fly along much better than under Vista (yes I had a little play with it). I got the feeling that if Dell were to deliver without Vista it wouldn't have been any cheaper but may have delayed the order a little by insisting on it.

Applications wise, I am usiing VuTrax for PCB schematic and layouts; I am using VfxLinux Forth for programming; I am looking at installing VariCAD for the mechanical design aspects (not free but reasonable price for what it does). Will be looking at Open Project for planning. I already have enough stuff for editing sound and videos and Open Office and the KDE mail/news/RSS/Calendar and Journal are a nice bundle to keep track of most things in comms and scheduling.

--
********************************************************************
Paul E. Bennett...............
Forth based HIDECS Consultancy
Mob: +44 (0)7811-639972
Tel: +44 (0)1235-811095
Going Forth Safely ..... EBA. www.electric-boat-association.org.uk..
********************************************************************

I don't understand...

I just typed in

I chose "Laptops/Notebooks" on the left hand side, then chose 'XP Pro Laptops'. Two clicks and I was at a list of 22. Yes, most of them are Off-Lease (used) but I think that's a function of Microsoft, rather than the laptop manufacturers.

Many of the laptops available in the market can be 'downgraded' to XP. One of the folks at my church just bought a Dell with Vista Home Basic without checking to find out if we could put it on our network. After a call to Dell, we used one of our VEU licenses to load XP Pro, and it works just fine. We also found out that Dell would have shipped it with XP Pro, if they had been asked to.

RB

You could save a bit by making friends with you local airport security staff

martin

I don't either. I didn't see anything like that.

I'm told you can downgrade only with the business version of Vista which costs $100 more. I really hate the idea of giving MS more money.

What is a VEU license?

They may have bought their laptop before Dell stopped selling XP. If I have wrong info, it is because Dell has been lying to me. I had read in EETimes that Dell was committed to providing XP on "select" laptops until 2010 when the next version of Windows would be out. When I asked Dell about it they got cranky and insisted that it was the last day to buy XP on their products. In fact, when I pressed the issue and quoted the article, the guy hung up on me. I think they were under pressure to book as many sales as they could that day and I wasn't a sure sell.

I would consider some of the other vendors more seriously, but Dell actually seems to have much better prices and I had gotten my sense of laptop value looking at their stuff. Now all the other machines seem to be overly expensive and lacking in value. Maybe when my next invoice is paid the prices will look a lot better to me... :^)

One thing that bugs me is that Dell does not provide presales support by email. I have to either use the "online" chat or phone them. With email I can ask a question and not have to wait on the phone for an answer.

I use Freecycle here and someone was offering several PCs around 7 or so years old (P3-500). He is willing to provide Ubuntu on them. I have asked for one in the hope that I can use that to learn a bit about Linux without changing my main machine. But I still have the same problem that for whatever reason, buying a laptop with anything other than Vista seems to greatly limit selection and cost a lot more! Someone had suggested a company that sold Linux laptops and a machine I can get from Dell for around $600 is $1000 from them!

Maybe I'll build one of those really tiny PCs that are almost as small as a laptop and use it as a portable machine rather than a laptop...

Rick

I haven't been able to prove it, but a suspiciously large number of websites for laptops, printers, scanners, etc. seem to have deleted their XP drivers, and it always seems to be the vendors that sell new systems with Vista on them that do this. I strongly suspect that Microsoft is trying to make it so that if you switch from Vista to XP, it will be very difficult to get your your ethernet, sound, etc. working.

--
Guy Macon

I haven't tried it, but I am pretty sure that you could then run the copy of Vista in a virual machine under XP using either VMWare or whatever MS is calling their virtualization this week. That would take care of any Vista Only apps you might run into.

--
Guy Macon