[ale] Cheap laptops for Linux?

[JD]

I don't think laptops deal with cooling very well, long term, 24/7/365.
Plus, you can find much cheaper Atom-class systems - $150.  A $60 APU+MB
solution is tremendously powerful.

I got this plus a steel case and PSU for $99 a few years ago.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128468
Added a spare HDD and 4G of RAM - done for under $130 total.  I didn't like the
noise of the included PSU, so a $45 picoPSU was added. Completely silent now and
has been running 24/7/365 ever since.  26W of power with a 4TB hdd now (added
that this year). Runs x64 Ubuntu Server with Plex and XBMC great - though it
isn't powerful enough to transcode.

Found the deal on slickdeals.  Just have to be ready when it happens.


On 07/31/2014 04:39 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
> Does anyone have a suggestion for finding a cheap, Linux capable laptop?
>  I have been considering migrating my personal mail server over to a
> small machine to make things quieter (loud fan and hard drive).  I was
> originally thinking one of the Intel NUCs with an internal 2.5 HDD but
> then I thought that an old laptop might do the same job for less than
> the cost of a lower end NUC (seems to be running around $200 bare then
> the HDD and RAM for another $100).
> 
> The machine I'm using now is a P-II in an ATX case with about 180MB of
> RAM and 8 GB HDD.  It runs headless on a shelf.
> 
> The one advantage it does have is that it's also got two hard serial
> ports (one for a label printer, one for a fax modem) and two parallel
> ports (for my printer of course) so as long as that still works with
> adapters of some form I'm ok.
> 
> I was also considering a NUC for a gateway/firewall but a laptop that
> could support two NICs might work, too.  This is to beef up my current
> solution which is an old Linksys WRT54G with OpenWRT.  Limited space
> although it still works so it's not something that really *needs*
> replacing but it would be easier to keep a regular OS up to date.
> ______________________________________