Replacing the internal wifi card is a pain with a lot of systems now. HP,
Dell, Toshiba, and Lenovo/IBM implement digital restrictions to prevent users
from replacing there wifi card with another. Companies make significant money
off of after-warranty part sales and so forcing individuals and repair
companies to go through them is extremely profitable.
Now there have been changing excuses over the years as to why they have
implemented these restrictions although the bottom line is these excuses are
a lie. Originally they were saying it was due to FCC regulations. However
there is no such regulation and the FCC explicitly wrote out a policy making
it clear that there is no requirement to white list (restrict) the cards.
In any case most if not all other companies ship without these restrictions
on this standard slot. That includes our laptops and desktops (I'm the CEO of
ThinkPenguin).
And of course there are other issues to be concerned about with any MS
Windows system or system sold by other companies supporting GNU/Linux. Most
(or all) are shipping systems which are not free software friendly. You may
miss out on things like suspend to ram, 3d acceleration, and wireless
support. Some of these may be less critical depending on your needs. The
wireless card can be replaced in most of these systems with one that is free
software friendly (other than from the companies above).
