Satellite A305-S6858 and HP Pavilion DV6933CL - compatibility and another question

[tico]

Hi,

I'm interested in buying a new laptop and are thinking on one of these. So I've got 2 questions:

1. Do they work fine with Ubuntu (any compatibility problem or unsupported hardware)?

2. I'd like to connect a cassette player to the new notebook (using a simple audio cable) to transfer old cassettes to CD or mp3. My old Acer laptop has 2 audio inputs: microphone and inline. Both work just fine for such a job (especially the inline jacket). Toshiba and HP notebooks have only the microphone jacket/input. Will I be able to connect my cassette player to transfer old cassettes to CDs? Any thoughts or experiences about this?

Thanks.

[sinclair86]

dont know about your second one but as for the first if you really want to make sure pop a live cd in and test drive it (if/when you buy it)

[tico]

Thanks for the reply. I've already tried to do this, but it's (apparently) impossible. It comes with a pre-installed Windows Vista and when you first turn the computer on you can't do anything before you configure your Vista sh*t. You can't even access the machine setup: you turn on the computer and a kind of "hello, setup your Vista installation" window pops up and there's no way to escape from that!! And because of that, vendors don't let me put a live CD, because they'll need to start the machine and they don't want to, because other clients will think the machine is not brand new blablabla. Kind of unbelievable.

Thanks anyway for your suggestion.

[sinclair86]

<3 BB floor models... lol

[tico]

It's really a strange new way of selling laptops...

[rhigby]

Thanks for the reply. I've already tried to do this, but it's (apparently) impossible. It comes with a pre-installed Windows Vista and when you first turn the computer on you can't do anything before you configure your Vista sh*t. You can't even access the machine setup: you turn on the computer and a kind of "hello, setup your Vista installation" window pops up and there's no way to escape from that!! And because of that, vendors don't let me put a live CD, because they'll need to start the machine and they don't want to, because other clients will think the machine is not brand new blablabla. Kind of unbelievable.

Thanks anyway for your suggestion.

SO... I bought the A305 and it didn't have any start up screen that would have been affected by running a live cd. They are just blowing smoke so that they don't have to work. Not that saying " go ahead, use this floor unit" is really work. I have no issues with the 305. I love it. One odd thing, I have 4 gigs of ram, 2gigX2 and my video uses shared mem. When I use Ubuntu, I only show 3 gigs. Is my vid taking a whole gig? If so, how can I get some of that mem back for my system?