[wplug] powernotebooks.com

[Vanco, Donald]

John Harrold wrote:
> has anyone here purchased a laptop from these people? i was wondering
> what kind of expirences anyone here has had. they seem to fare well
> at resellerratings.com. 
	While I did not look at these notebooks / this site in particular,
there are literally only about 4 notebook manufacturers out there (in
Taiwan) and they design reference models for pretty much everybody.  What I
found is that the current strain of laptops were, in fact, WinPuters.  The
new slew of chipsets from VIA rely on the OS (in this case - WinXP) to
really make them work, and Linux was NOT a candidate for them.  The more
intelligent sites I looked at told you specifically that these are "new
technology" notebooks that require a Microsoft OS.  There are several on
eBay that say that too.....

	Likewise, while Centino development work is progressing, it's not
prime-time for Linux by any means.

	I'd also say that ATI chipsets are more desirable than nVidia, but I
suppose it's all a matter of how much you want to diddle your laptop post
install, and nVidia has come out with a unified driver.... but I  just can't
get past a "binary only" driver.

	I ended up buying a 2.4GHz Dell Inspiron 4100 and have been very
pleased.  Hyperthreading would have been nice -  I had no idea there was a
mobile CPU that supported it.

YMMV
Don