[tlug] Notebook Question

[Jim Breen <jwb@example.com>]

G'day All,

Well today my wife came home to find a hole in the roof, the 
manhole into the ceiling open, and a couple of things missing,
including my Toshiba notebook. FORTUNATELY I had spent much of
Monday making zipped tarball backups to CD, so the loss of
data is not dramatic, however I am about to buy a new notebook.

Two questions from this:

- looking at the "brandname" models I see that there are equivalent
systems from Compaq, Toshiba and IBM. (256M, 20Gb, etc.)  Does
anyone have any comments on the suitability, ease of installation, etc.
for Linux (e.g. RH7.3)?

- some come with XP. I think I need to leave a basic Win partition
as laptops seem to need various config utilities installed there. Does
anyone have useful experience to share about shrinking the partition
with XP?

TIA

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen  (j.breen@example.com  http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/)
Computer Science & Software Engineering,                Tel: +61 3 9905 3298
P.O Box 26, Monash University,                          Fax: +61 3 9905 5146
Clayton VIC 3800, Australia      ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学