I want to comment on the brand issue.
Do avoid HP, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba, and Dell. These companies are restricting
what wifi cards can be installed in there machines. This is very bad! It
means you won't be able to get the system working with GNU/Linux unless it
already ships with an Atheros wifi card. Not all Atheros wifi cards will work
or work well. So if yours works- but later realize it isn't working well
there are no options to replace it with something better.
The local issue may or may not be an issue. Without knowing what country it's
hard to tell. Brazil for instance isn't a country I'd suggest ordering a
laptop from ThinkPenguin at this time. There are heavy duties (60%). On the
other hand the UK, Spain, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and many other
countries in Europe are no problem. Shipping is fast, shipping prices are
low/reasonable, etc. There is another group of countries which we ship too as
well although it is slightly more expensive because of the countries
unreliable postal system and/or slow customs (Germany). Most of our customers
we have been able to work with on repair issues easily or worked with a local
repair shop to avoid shipping back/forth. As has been commented many times we
have an excellent reputation for making this fast/easy. Within the USA we
often can get a laptop fixed and shipped back out within a 1-2 days. About
half our laptops ship to customers outside of the Untied states so we are
pretty good with customs/etc and know what shipping method/service to use and
what the taxes, etc will be before you make a purchase. We stock EU, UK, AU,
and North American AC adapters.
There is a graphics card with an nVidia chipset that works pretty well, it's
the 9500GT, but it also is for desktops only.
As far as high end wireless cards go there is at least one chipset from
Atheros that is (or should be) compatible with Trisquel.
