Hello Bill, My last laptop was (still in use) a Lenovo T61. It was mistakenly ordered with Vista. We only used XP and Linux. When XP was installed, it just never worked - blue screened every day. So I inherited the misfit and installed Linux. Works great. It is a nice work horse. Nice keybd. If the screen had been higher res, I would have used it longer.
So when I bought a new one, I looked at Thinkpads. Their quotes are horrible!!! Unreadable. Random number options with descriptions consisting of random strings. Any not all options were even on it. I complained to the rep who replied he has been complaining about it for years. It was pricey. Nice features though. I would have liked it. I looked at Dell and bought a Precision M6500 I7. Dell gives us pretty good corp discounts. It is currently running LMDE(xfce). It has been great. We have several, others running Windoze. One coworker has had nothing but trouble. Dell shipped bad memory in many machines and it took months for Dell to identify and fix. That was months of blue screens for him. You would think Dell would keep track of what brand parts were in what machines. It was some Israeli brand no one ever heard of. Many complained on the forums. I had the good memory. Two weeks ago his drive died. Just clicked when turned on. Now his 'windows restored' OS is leaking memory and crashes daily. Takes about 6 hrs to leak 3.3 GB before crashing. I have to quietly laugh at the last part. One nice thing about Dell and precisions are that there is (or was) US based Linux support - one guy. He is good. I havent needed him much, but have talked to him. My laptop came with Redhat, not the India supported Ubuntu. Though I have not used the lic. since we switched to CentOS (virtual machine). At home, I bought a Zareason strata laptop and desktop, both I7s. Zareason is one of the linux-only sellers. Both machines have been very good. Again, they have US based support and they know Linux. They support many distros including requests I believe. The desktop came with the wrong p/s.....a much bigger and better one. They both run LMDE. I'll likely buy from zareason for home or work next time. Others on this list seem to think highly of zareason to. David
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