Best HP Laptop for Educational Purpose

[bigbrovar]

Hi guys i need some suggestions on the best HP laptop that works 100 percent with linux out of the box. and can be used by university student. Am a system admin for the African University of Science and Technology www.aust.edu.ng we Run Ubuntu Linux on all our computers including the laptops we give to our students. We decided to go for HP because of their service centers in which is very close our school.

right now am considering a laptop with a Gigabit Network card, and Wireless N. but something that will work out of the box on ubuntu without any tweaking. (not that i scared to tweak, just that from experience laptops with drivers supported by the Linux kernel tend to work better and more stable especially when it comes to upgrading) for this i decided to would be good we go with Laptops with Intel Graphics and Intel Wireless cards. please if you know or have used an HP laptop that works well with ubuntu (and is not a pavilion or presario ) i would appreciate with you can drop your suggestion here.

[ddrichardson]

Hi guys i need some suggestions on the best HP laptop that works 100 percent with linux out of the box. and can be used by university student. Am a system admin for the African University of Science and Technology www.aust.edu.ng we Run Ubuntu Linux on all our computers including the laptops we give to our students. We decided to go for HP because of their service centers in which is very close our school.

right now am considering a laptop with a Gigabit Network card, and Wireless N. but something that will work out of the box on ubuntu without any tweaking. (not that i scared to tweak, just that from experience laptops with drivers supported by the Linux kernel tend to work better and more stable especially when it comes to upgrading) for this i decided to would be good we go with Laptops with Intel Graphics and Intel Wireless cards. please if you know or have used an HP laptop that works well with ubuntu (and is not a pavilion or presario ) i would appreciate with you can drop your suggestion here.

With respect to HP, I have has nothing but problems with them as a company and especially in relation to using GNU/Linux. I even had to reinstall Vista on one before they'd fix a faulty wireless card.

Strange ACPI implementations and odd wireless cards at different revisions on the same model make the tricky to administer.

I have a TX1250EA and it's motherboard failed, there are lots of people complaining about it but HP are ignoring my mails. This is the same issue that HP recalled dv7000/9000 series over and yet they refuse to honour this fault on the TX1000 series.

This may be a one off and YMMV but in my experience HP laptops are cost effective for features only because so many poorer components are used in a small form factor. Every one I've used suffers from over heating issues.

[bigbrovar]

@ddrichardson what you say is quite true... even the laptops that are students currently use have problems with sound the sound just stop working after a while. but we have little choice. naturally i would have gone for a dell ubuntu but we can get that here in Nigeria and dell also doesnt have a service center here which is very important to us. same for acer and lenovo. in the end we choose to stick with HP since the goods would come with warranties which will be treated by their service center here.

[ddrichardson]

@ddrichardson what you say is quite true... even the laptops that are students currently use have problems with sound the sound just stop working after a while. but we have little choice. naturally i would have gone for a dell ubuntu but we can get that here in Nigeria and dell also doesnt have a service center here which is very important to us. same for acer and lenovo. in the end we choose to stick with HP since the goods would come with warranties which will be treated by their service center here.

That's understandable but if you have no choice then make sure you have a longer warranty than the standard year, which appears to be when they fall over.

[davo11]

i have a mini note 2133. it's great. ultra-portable and brilliant for homework. it's one of the new class of netbooks - affordable, small and very good for internet/office/homework.
it comes with suse 10 as cheapest but could install ubuntu on it

[bigbrovar]

davo11
Re: Best HP Laptop for Educational Purpose
i have a mini note 2133. it's great. ultra-portable and brilliant for homework. it's one of the new class of netbooks - affordable, small and very good for internet/office/homework.
it comes with suse 10 as cheapest but could install ubuntu on it

thanks but we rather get a proper notebook. due to screen size

[Polygon]

i have a compaq presario F767NR, (compaq is owned by hp, but the laptop cases look a bit more professional and plain, and don't have glossy crap all over)

it works fine, linux is a bit iffy on it but jaunty seems to work perfectly with it now. 700 dollars, and it has 2 gb of ram, 2 ghz dual core processor, 15.1 inch screen, nvidia gfx card, multimedia card reader, etc etc

[Twitch6000]

I have a HP G60-120US and it is working fine for me.

Ubuntu 8.10
Ubuntu 9.04(yes this one works nicely)
Linux Mint 6
PClinuxOS 2009.1
And Mandriva 2009.1 One


Those are all the distros that worked out of the box or with minimal tweaking with my laptop .

[bigbrovar]

Thanks guys for all the suggestion .. decided to go with this http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en...5-3355650.html on the surface seem to have everything i need. if anybody runs ubuntu on this machine please let me know how it performs