I am seeking a cheap laptop computer for use as a part of a product, and wanted to know if you guys had any recommendations. The computer will run Linux and will for the most part not do any heavy computing, though some eye-candy will be necessary. Buying used computers is probably not an option.

Requirements:

  • First of all, the computer must be stable. No overheating, weird hardware issues or obvious design flaws.
  • Second greatest requirement is price. The cheaper, the better.
  • Must have touchpad
  • No webcam, I'm not paying for that
  • A single core processor will do fine
  • 1 GiB of RAM (could possibly go with 512 MiB if necessary)
  • 50 GiB harddrive or more
  • Some kind of Internet connection possibility
  • At least one USB port
  • Battery life is not really an issue, it will be plugged in most of the time
  • About 14" screen or above, 1366 x 768 resolution would be nice, but not at all crucial
  • Build quality should be fairly high, it should give the impression of something that'll last, not a bunch of cheap plastic.
  • Should not be overly noisy
  • Design should not be outright ugly, something neutral.
    • Grayscale color (white, black, gray etc.)
  • Should have a video card with an OpenGL 3.x compatible NVIDIA GPU

OpenGL 3.x compatible means G80 or newer (from NVIDIA's website):

  • Quadro FX 360M, 370M, 570M, 770M, 1600M, 1700M, 2700M, 2800M, 3600M, 3700M, 3800M
  • GeForce 8000 series or higher

The video card does not have to be a very well performing one. It should not overheat, and not be too noisy, that's all. Any of the video cards based on the GPUs listed above should be more than strong enough for what I'm going to throw at it.

I'd be very glad for any help with this :) If you can't find any specific computers (I guess it could be hard to find any that are in sale today), I'd love to know how close I can get to these requirements, and roughly how much I should expect to pay. Cheers

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Shopping questions are off-topic as per the FAQ: it is not about a shopping or buying recommendation – Sathya Nov 4 '10 at 22:52
Oh too bad. Though this is not for personal shopping – oystein Nov 4 '10 at 22:55
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closed as off topic by Sathya, BloodPhilia, Moab, Diago Nov 5 '10 at 7:59

Questions on Super User are expected to generally relate to computer software or computer hardware, within the scope defined in the faq.

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Lenovo G550 is a decent cheap laptop, it's available with an GeForce G105M (essentially a low power GeForce 9300) in some markets.

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Not bad, but comes with a webcam & 4 gigs of ram, so I was hoping for something cheaper. Thanks for replying to an off-topic question, though :) – oystein Nov 5 '10 at 0:25
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