[ubuntu-uk] buying a laptop?

[Rowan Berkeley]

I got my current laptop from Linux Emporium (a Lenovo N500), and I'm
quite happy with it (apart from the BIOS-level fact that it tests the CD
drive three times during every startup, which is a noisy and irritating
waste of time). But after eight months or something I suffered a general
disintegration of my user file system (which was all backed up on an
external hard drive formatted in EXT3), so I installed 10.04 from a Live
CD, obliterating the custom installation which had been provided by
Linux Emporium. My moral is, what we need is 'naked computer' suppliers,
since we are better off installing our own Ubuntu systems from Live CDs
and if we are completely computer-less we can get Live CDs ready-made.

While discussing suppliers, let me remind anyone tempted to lash out on
an expensive high-resolution-display model from Linux Certified in
California: don't do it. They use a non-default ethernet interface
driver because their expensive high-resolution-display machines don't
like the default one and it behaves unstably. Thus, the very first time
you run an online update from Ubuntu, your machine will lose its
ethernet interface. This is such an elementary piece of stupidity that I
feel Linux Certified should be forced to refund customers who complain
about it, but US customer law is no more customer friendly than customer
law anywhere else, and provides no easy way of demanding this.