On Thursday 02 September 2004 01:48 pm, marcia wrote:

Dear All,

I have been assigned the job to look for and purchase a new desktop for my stepson. He likes my Suse 8.2 pro dual boot with windows. He wants something similar to my setup. I have an athlon 1600+ xp with 60 gig harddrive(soon to increase to 200 GB) 512 megs memory, etc. He is not a do it yourselfer(yet) for working on computer problems really so I looked at Dell first.

Dell has a special for $499. In reality to get it to be an acceptable deal it comes closer to $750. He wants a printer and scanner as well and I wondered if the all in one Dell model will work with Linux. This is the advertised TV special that has been on lately. His father(my husband) wants to purchase this soon but does not want to go over the $700 range. It is a challenge so far to get everything right so that it is a good computer for his son's needs at that price.

Any suggestions? My stepson is open to athlon or pentiums and probably needs some kind of support that is decent as well as good warranties all in the $700 range . It would be better if Linux is already installed with the windows since he has never done that sort of thing and I live many miles away from him. I would otherwise install linux for him.

Any suggestions and ideas will be gratefully received.

Others can probably tell you the hardware to buy better than I can but I would offer this suggestion: 1) Have it shipped to you. 2) Put linux on it in dual boot form. 3) Do any other setup necessary. 4) Ship or deliver to him...... This assumes you can't find a computer with Linux already on it but I would doubt you could find one with a dual-boot situation. I might be wrong. But given the above, you would know more about how the computer was set up in the first place and could also put the proper hooks in place to allow you to access it for maintenacne if needed. Just my $.02 -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 09/02/04 14:07 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Katz's Law: "People and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted."

On Thursday 02 September 2004 6:48 pm, marcia wrote:

Dear All,

I have been assigned the job to look for and purchase a new desktop for my stepson. He likes my Suse 8.2 pro dual boot with windows. He wants something similar to my setup. I have an athlon 1600+ xp with 60 gig harddrive(soon to increase to 200 GB) 512 megs memory, etc. He is not a do it yourselfer(yet) for working on computer problems really so I looked at Dell first.

Dell has a special for $499. In reality to get it to be an acceptable deal it comes closer to $750. He wants a printer and scanner as well and I wondered if the all in one Dell model will work with Linux. This is the advertised TV special that has been on lately. His father(my husband) wants to purchase this soon but does not want to go over the $700 range. It is a challenge so far to get everything right so that it is a good computer for his son's needs at that price.

Any suggestions? My stepson is open to athlon or pentiums and probably needs some kind of support that is decent as well as good warranties all in the $700 range . It would be better if Linux is already installed with the windows since he has never done that sort of thing and I live many miles away from him. I would otherwise install linux for him.

Any suggestions and ideas will be gratefully received.

Thanks very much.

Marcia

I don't know very much about the US market at all. I did understand that HP-Compaq were doing a Linux box - no more details. If you want to get it in under the price, consider dropping the scanner and may be the printer until later. If you do get a bundle, be sure of exactly what printer and scanner you will get. Sometimes things are changed unannounced, and it would be a right pain to end up with an unsupported win printer. Have you considered expanding the budget by buying new for you and passing on your present PC [especially as your stepson likes it]?