Russell Gadd wrote:
> Thanks for the comments. I have bought a desktop from Novatech before,
> but not a laptop. Looked at the Dell site and found more options here.
>
> I took my wife to PC World to look at various sizes and options and
> she decided on a 17 inch widescreen because she thinks it more suited
> to her spreadsheet work. Perused the Dell offerings and after some
> toing and froing with specs and user opinions gleaned from the web we
> decided on a much more expensive laptop the Vostro 1700:
>
> http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/4x_vostro_1700?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd
>
>
> I have to pretend to be a small business in order to access these
> models. May be a bit ott but looks a very solid product and good value
> for the spec. Ubuntu forums confirm that it plays nicely with Linux.
> Unfortunately still had to pay the Microsoft tax.
>
> One reason for a beefier machine (4G ram) was the potential to use VMs
> to play with - would be nice to be able to load the Vista into a VM in
> this PC, but I expect this is not in accordance with the licence -
> unless somebody knows different. However not really fussed - I will
> keep it on the machine since the HDD is big - will use my favourite
> boot manager (BootitNG - proprietary not FOSS) which I can use to
> resize/ alter partitions before loading Ubuntu and possibly other
> distros later.
>
> Russell
>
ISTR reading somewhere that Microsoft had loosened up their policy on
licensing Vista on VMs. It used to be only the expensive versions (Ultimate
Edition?), but I have the impression you can install other versions now.
However, a quick google failed to turn up anything which confirms this.
MikeD
