Laptop with linux

[madokie]

I'm looking to purchase a laptop minus windows. I'll be using ubuntu and see no reason to pay for windows 7 or xp. Brand name at this point is not too much of a concern for me as I'm not sure who builds the better one anyway. My question is where would I go to start a search. I'm not looking for a bare bones system as waiting is not one of my better traits. If anyone can point me in a direction to begin this search I'll be one happy okie. :-)
Thanks and have a great day

[hobbit709]

1. Those are few and far between

Your best bet is to find one on sale, make the backup disks and then wipe the drive and install whatever OS you want.
Another method is to buy another hard drive and replace the one with Windows and keep it on a shelf. That way you can always switch it back to sell it or whatever.
Around here I've seen decent laptops for between $350-400 on sale. Doesn't really matter about brand name, most of them are pretty much the same in that price range. I personally like HP/Compaq but Toshiba isn't too bad. I don't like Dell for political reasons but I haven't seen one brand more often than any other when they come in for me to fix.
What specs do you want and what are you going to use it for?

[madokie]

2. I want good specs not just some mediocre machine

If I can't buy one without windows then I'll be wiping whatever comes with it and installing linux but I'd like to not have to pay billy boy for his OS if I could.

Ultimately I hope to use wine to run autocad with it once I figure that all out. I'm new to this linux world and my plan it to get as far away from the hassles and bull of micro$hits products as I can.

Since I have your ear you may be able to help with with a little annoyance I'm having. On this install of ubuntu 9.1 this time I have no sound option in my preference menu. I have sound on my computer, no problem there and it all works fine but I'm wanting to turn the system sounds off like the beeps and such and no where do I find the sounds option where I can turn those annoying sounds off. What do I have to do short of reinstalling to get that back? Thanks

Another thing how do I make VLC my default player? again thanks

[CK_John]

3. Check out these buys. Many are Refurbished. In this economy that means repo's not rebuilt.

These are machines from stores that went bellyup and not rebuilts. Now no one will guarantee that but my sources in resell tell me that rebuilts are sent overseas to be striped for parts and repos are what is now on the market.

Here is link for some that are priced low enough that you could buy 2.

<http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=NBB>

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Recomended reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_devices#Laptops
You might need to check compatibility for those without Ubuntu, but I doubt there will be too many issues.

Or, you could try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_refund
But I wouldn't. ;)