Jeni's Musings

Hmm, Jeni says I’m trying to “persuade” her towards the Dells - but I’m really just trying to cover the good options. I think the Dells have disadvantages (like all the alternatives) but also it’s great to see the range of options they have AND a mainstream manufacturer offering a way to avoid the Microsoft tax - and even to have a version of GNU/Linux installed and fully working all the hardware. Personally, I mainly use debian but frequently flirt (usually virtualised) with ubuntu for the great tweaks it can offer.

John - I’ve had success getting IE6 and IE7 running under Wine (using IES4Linux) well enough to automate testing of their rendering of dynamic html pages. Clunky aspects but it does seem to work.

Anyway, two main points:
(a) the XPS M1330 now seems to offer a T8300 or T9300 cpu option, which may be worth it. The important thing is to go higher than the T5450 in order to get the Vanderpool support for virtualisation of unmodified OSes
(b) the link in Jeni’s post to the ubuntu version seems now to be broken (“expired offer”??) - which leads me to:
Mini-rant: isn’t the Dell Euro site just the most annoying thing? Navigation is haywire, you can’t seem to find things you found before, you’re never sure you’ve got the final answer… It feels to me like a microcosm of the state of information overload we may be headed for.

Good luck, Jeni, in choosing, and do post your conclusions. A bit of me wants you to choose the Mac, and then find that Apple-world isn’t the wonderland the advocates claim!