Best Laptop to buy for Freebsd Without OS?

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 07:23:57PM -0800, Charlie Kester wrote:
> 
> Does it have to be new?  
> 
> The best deal might be to get a used laptop.  Then it doesn't matter
> what it originally shipped with, all you care about is whether it's on
> the FreeBSD hardware compatibility list.
> 
> Along these lines, I've seen many people recommending used ThinkPads.
> Might not be powerful enough for the latest Windows, but more than
> capable for running a BSD.

Be very careful buying used laptops.  There are a lot of refurbishers who
are very shady, and a lot of private sellers online that are trying to
make a fast buck off broken hardware.

In fact, I wrote some code for a shady refurbisher last year to clean
infections of their laptops -- infections that had worked its way into
the images they used to clone drives for refurbished computers.  I think
thousands of their systems probably went out infected before they had me
automate the virus-cleaning process for them.

The short version is simply that I've seen how shady refurbishers work,
up close and personal.  Let the buyer beware.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20110218/2f7d5bcd/attachment-0001.pgp