Wanted: a working PC laptop

[0x58]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

My room mate has an eeePC and the only complaint I have is that the keyboard is tiny. I am unable to comfortably type on it for extended periods of time. Which is a shame as I would love to have an ultra-portable that is nice and small.

[DJ Jackalope]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

I fully agree-- however I escape that a little bit (sort of), with my dainty girly fingers. I can't imagine being a normal sized adult male trying to use that keyboard, it would take years of practice and maybe a finger transplant.

[0x58]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

I fully agree-- however I escape that a little bit (sort of), with my dainty girly fingers. I can't imagine being a normal sized adult male trying to use that keyboard, it would take years of practice and maybe a finger transplant.

It would take a lot of practice. It took me a good hour to start typing on it at any decent speed.

[Suriyawong]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

I'm actually looking at the eeePC's too... I want to run Backtrack3 on something, but I can't find any old used laptops that are cheap enough. I don't want to spend a lot of money ($50-100 if possible) because I'm new to using this kind of software. I've never done any kind of hacks, but I'm majoring in Networking, so I think it might be a good skill to have and know how to defend against. If anyone has a really crappy laptop that can run Backtrack3 or xUbuntu, can they let me know? If I can't find one soon, I might just invest in the eeePC. We'll see I guess.

[moleprince]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

I'm actually looking at the eeePC's too... I want to run Backtrack3 on something, but I can't find any old used laptops that are cheap enough. I don't want to spend a lot of money ($50-100 if possible) because I'm new to using this kind of software. I've never done any kind of hacks, but I'm majoring in Networking, so I think it might be a good skill to have and know how to defend against. If anyone has a really crappy laptop that can run Backtrack3 or xUbuntu, can they let me know? If I can't find one soon, I might just invest in the eeePC. We'll see I guess.

You may wish to keep an eye out on ebay. Every now and then you can score a serviceable Panosonic Toughbook CF-27 for right in that price range. They're damn solid machines of the 300Mhz 128Mb RAM variety, but will quite happily run at least fluxbuntu [I just installed it a few minutes ago to check for someone else, actually]. I haven't tried Backtrack, yet, so I'm uncertain if the KDE overhead is too much for them, but I've owned and run three over the years in console mode for years with everything from Gentoo/FreeBSD/Debian/Ubuntu and been very contented. The only drawback is most don't come with the internal CD-RW drive, which'll put you out another 75-100$, and the USB doesn't have bootable support under BIOS [at least the versions that I have found]. So you may end up with a Grub boot floppy epoxied into your drive if you need to run off a USB or SD card. Just my 0.02c.

[DJ Jackalope]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

I want to run Backtrack3 on something, but I can't find any old used laptops that are cheap enough. I don't want to spend a lot of money ($50-100 if possible) because I'm new to using this kind of software.

You can also just use a USB Flash drive as a boot disk if you just want to load BT3 or something. I'm messing around with that on mine. You just asked my original question at the start of the post since I was looking for the exact same thing and ended up with the eeePC.

Also. If you want to go super hell cheap: VMWare. And get some virtual machines runnin, assuming, of course, you have at least one. You can also network all your VM's together if you want networking practice. I'm also a networking major and was also looking for something to play around with. (In addition to learning BT3, etc.)

[Suriyawong]

Re: Wanted: a working PC laptop

Yeah, I've run plenty of VM's between my classes and computer play at home. I tried running Backtrack3 on a VM and it worked fine in VESA mode... however it doesn't support my computer's wireless card at all, so I couldn't test out any of the wireless features (which is what I saw originally in the Backtrack3 Trailer). I'm waiting on a new hard drive for my laptop that I've got now and when I get it (should be today) I'm going to partition it to run Ubuntu and BT3. I still would like a machine to strictly run these, I'll just have to keep my eyes open. Thanks!