Trevor Warren trevorwarren@yahoo.com wrote: __________

Hello JTD,

With IBM jettisioning it's PC division things don't look too good for other manufacturers too but luckily as i hear laptops are a different story. Let me forewarn you that i am not in anyway an advocate for classy brands but in this case it pays to safe than be sorry.

IBM and Dell in india is the best that money can get.

I thought laptops were a part of the pc division of ibm sold to the chineese.

Don't use dell. You are dpendent on dell to service you. Unless you are a large corporate, you will need to go down on knees and beg for service.

Dell does not support linux on laptops. Hp and ibm you can get service from multiple support centers and they officially sell laptops with linux preloaded. The linux loaded laptops are cheaper by at least 7k.

Acer is also good, cheap and supports linux. So does toshiba - yesterday's advt 50k or so.

Have a look at zenith laptops. Their quality is suprisingly good. I speak from experiance of friends.

And as for Gnu-Linux - BSD, you should be able get any freaking GPL'ed application running on them without a hitch. Make sure you get wifi support since thats the norm if you will be travelling to europe/us.

Most laptops here are sold with wifi 11b standards which are slow and outdated. Only toshiba and zenith have wifi 11g. That is almost 6 times faster and is now the standard in all laptops in western markets.

Saswata