I'm looking at getting hold of a laptop for work - as I need access to both windows and some *nix variant it needs to be capable of bual booting. SO far I have been strongly warned of acers which are apparently very difficult to get to do anything non-standard on. Anyone got any hints on what are particulaly good or bad makes to look at?

Thanks in advance.

Neil

the dell 8600 is my favourite model at the moment. Should be possible to dual boot it farily easily.

if dual boot is a problem,Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net/) boots from CD, so no dual boot required.

Free GPL(GNU)

the problems with the acers aren't so much the dual boot, it's more likely to be hardware that linux doesn't support. Booting from knoppix or mandrake live or the debian live cd would prove that they will/won't work on that machine.
Once you're happy with a dist that works on that machine though, i'd recommend actually installing it, this can be done from the live cd's these days i believe.

I think alot depends on your budget, how much do you want to spend? do you want to play games on it? would you buy a second hand one?

I've had really good luck with Dell laptops (Inspirons, and Lattitudes). I've had a few that dual boot Win2k and variants of Linux (Suse, Mandrake, Redhat).. Have never had a problem with unsupported hardware on these models.

I can highly recommend a HP (Compaq) NX-9005. It's a very powerful machine and you can buy direct from HP.

It has a 15" screen, DVD drive and CD-writer and much more and you will find it much cheaper than the rubbish in mainstream PC stores and even on-line.