Peter,
Ouch! That was quite expensive! I made a mistake about the price for the extensa though, it was more like $470, with no OS.

I am planning to get a laptop soon, I dont think I want high end type laptop...I just need a laptop that is durable. I am not a programmer, I dont consider myself computer literate! I like doing the most with the minimum. I dont do lots of video editing. I occasionally need to write a few movies eg. my kidoz birthday parties, occasionally isobust and dvd shrink some scratched dvd, very occasionally... I use nero 7 ultra for recoding etc. I rarely game on laptops. I need one which has card reader for major cards, a fiteen inch glossy display n can take 4gb ram (no more!) I want inexpensive, am sure u seen expensive cpus with double/quad cores etc runnin software not written for multi thread, and huge rams that OS cant even see! I need something very compatible with linux, esp Ubuntu. I hate mac. Any gud ideas?

Cheupe

Dell is obvious choice with their budget products, I can recommend HP (had one before acer, no faults still running my girlfriend brother is using it) and I was recently looking on Asus as I have lot of desktop hardware from them which is reliable so I was considering to give them a try.
Dell does some laptop specially with Ubuntu pre-installed, I know that some Asus models been available too, but not sure about HP. In reality you can buy any laptop and just reinstall it with Ubuntu or any unix OS

I have two family members that bought Acer computers at around the same time. This was less than two years ago; neither computer is being used anymore - they both had to buy new laptops because of crappy parts. Basically the screen completely separated on my dads and I don't know about my sister but she has an HP now. Acer = bad

Yeah, dont like em. My friend edds just wont boot at all, the keyboard and HDD died on my mate gavs, and all the usb ports died on my cousin emmas. They all had the same model. Acers support was terrible.

Have to agree with that one hands down. While my wife's Aspire 6930g notebook has been a delight for her to use (is one of the high-end models), ran into their "support" team (if one could even call their offerings support)

Was looking to upgrade the BIOS, pre Win7, to ensure max compatibility... Acer "support" refused point blank to either give the nod, or advise on difficulties I was having on actually applying said updates (the most unuser-friendly BIOS upgrade utilities I've encountered to date). This left two options:

• Struggle through flashing the BIOS and viod the warranty
• Leave as is and risk incompatibilities

Given Acer's rep for faulty hardware, was forced to take the latter option, but was certainly left with a bad taste in the mouth. Will not be buying another of the wares!

I had some bad experiences with Acer laptops (my very first laptop was from acer) so I normally will not recommend them.

I would not recommend acer to you mate. Seriously they are near the bottom in my list. I would suggest mac for you but i any case if you want a PC that runs windows, go for HP or Sony.

Other than the fact he wants something low-cost, doesnt do any video editing, wants a card reader, and most importantly, hates macs