[WolfCoder]

It's simple. I'm going to save up and replace this horrible miserable failure of an HP laptop and retire it with everything HP that doesn't work (which is basically 99% of HP's recent product line). I heard they used to make good hardware, but now this is just aggravating.

Alright I've seen plenty of microcomputers made by different companies. Here's what I'm looking for in suggestions:

Maximize:
* Sturdiness / Armor / Resilience. Especially the LCD screen, the thing needs compete with my DELL desktop for lasting long. The stupid keyboard in my HP was made so it pushes against the LCD screen, ruining it over time.
* Competence The hardware must just work. Lots of RAM and 2xCPU is good here. I care about the 2xCPU rather than the speed of each core, actually.
* Minimize Price I'm looking for something that won't eat at my pocket. I really need to save money, and I've seen some of these things run for 300 to 400. A SS hardrive would be crazy, I just want a simple microcomputer with Linux on it so it would be nice if the price was right.

Sacrifice:
* No operating system required, I'm just going to immediately insert the latest version of Ubuntu Linux or some other Linux anyway.
* Hard drives not an issue, other than the hard drive not dying, I don't care if it's small.
* Ports? I would love a CD drive or USB, but if it boots USB and I can put Ubuntu on a thumb drive and install it from there I won't be needing a CD drive. I don't want to buy anything other than the microcomptuer.
* Wireless I don't care if it doesn't have a wireless card- I've got a USB one that's much stronger anyway.
* Beauty I'm not a rabid Apple fanboy buying a machine because it's shiny, I just want a computer so I don't care what it looks like (unless it's obscene looking).
* Keyboard The keyboards on these things are hard to type with. I don't care, it's good if it has a keyboard PS/2 port because I'll just put a keyboard where my laptop used to be because the microcomputer is small enough for me put in my lunch compartment.
* Mouse same with the mice. I've got like 3 mice that would work wonders, and 2 of them are wireless USB.

And most of all, it must not be made by HP.

[Martyr2]

I don't know who told you that HP made great computers. HP has ONLY ever made two great products.... printers and calculators. Now their printers are getting questionable at times but their calculators have always been pretty solid.

I NEVER buy an HP computer. There is a reason they push that crap at places like Futureshop/Circuit City/Best Buy. They are cheap and the markup is then good.

Maybe I would go with an HP if my only other choice was a compaq desktop. I think if you would have asked on the board most of us would have told you to stay away from HP.

[LaviadonTQC]

While I wouldn't say to the extreme that you shouldn't by a HP notebook. When you buy a pre-built system the thing you’re looking from a company is support. So when people say HP sell the best computer most users are talking about support. We all have issues and the non-experienced computer user will tell you this.

What you should do is go to http://www.newegg.com and poke around. Read the reviews and see what people say. That will help you most.

[Tom9729]

WolfCoder,

The Asus Eee PCs are pretty nice and you can get one with 1.6ghz/1gb for ~300$.

I don't think you'll find many netbooks with anything better than a 1.6ghz (Intel Atom) processor though, so if you're concerned with CPU power you might want to just buy a normal laptop.

I've never had anything wrong with HP computers. They sell most of them for pretty cheap, and honestly when it comes to hardware you usually get what you paid for (or you get ripped off). It would be nice if they preinstalled them with less crap though.

[KYA]

I've had an e-machines laptop for 6 years and its still chugging along.

[WolfCoder]

Quote

I don't think you'll find many netbooks with anything better than a 1.6ghz (Intel Atom)

I don't mind, what's really important is competence and that it can at least run emulators up to SNES/Genesis. I'll be using it to program often, and my Dell was a 2Ghz 1xCPU with an Intel graphics adaptor so these little things might actually run my 3D apps as good as my DELL did. They had way more RAM than my dell (512MB base as opposed to my pitiful 128MB in the DELL).

It would be nice if all my games accommodated microcomputers. Just need to turn off shaders and reduce the particle count- ought to do it. Also I need to do single core optimizations otherwise it all falls apart.

KYA, on 11 Apr, 2009 - 08:02 AM, said:

I've had an e-machines laptop for 6 years and its still chugging along.

I might look into an eMachines microcomputer if they make any because my Grandma's old ~700Mhz celeron thing from an age long past still runs smoothly and nicely as a server. It would be funny if I had it serve my personal web page. With our consumer internet and the little machine pages might take like half a minute to load I need to figure out how to make a machine report and update it's IP address with a registered domain name so if the IP changes the people can still go there.

This post has been edited by WolfCoder: 13 April 2009 - 09:48 AM

[Tom9729]

WolfCoder, on 13 Apr, 2009 - 11:45 AM, said:

I might look into an eMachines microcomputer if they make any because my Grandma's old ~700Mhz celeron thing from an age long past still runs smoothly and nicely as a server. It would be funny if I had it serve my personal web page. With our consumer internet and the little machine pages might take like half a minute to load I need to figure out how to make a machine report and update it's IP address with a registered domain name so if the IP changes the people can still go there.

Take a look at FreeDNS. They have some scripts that will do what you are trying to do (and their DNS service is free, as you may have guessed from the sitename).

Before I found them, I used a script that checked my IP address and sent an email to me if it changed (I had cron run it every hour).

Here's a copy of it if you'd like some inspiration.

Note:
You'll have to have some kind of mail delivery agent setup (like exim4) for the mail command to work. Also if you have more than one network interface, you'll probably want to change this to keep track of that as well.

#!/bin/zsh
# 
# Quick script to check the current IP address,
# compare it to a previously saved one, and
# email it to an address if it has changed.
#
# Author: Tom Arnold

EMAIL="[email protected]"
SUBJECT="$(hostname) IP update"
ADDR="$(/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr:" | sed -e 's/:/ /g' | read a b c d; echo $c)"
FILE="/tmp/old_ip"

if [ "$ADDR" != "" ];
then
	if [ -e "$FILE" ];
	then
	OLD="$(cat "$FILE")"
	
	if [ "$OLD" != "$ADDR" ];
	then
		echo "$ADDR" | mail "$EMAIL" -s "$SUBJECT"
		echo "$ADDR" > "$FILE"
	fi
	else
	echo "$ADDR" > "$FILE"
	fi
fi