the retail store im working for is having a special for friends and family of the store in which one of the specials is on a new compaq presario rs3210us laptop the retail on it is 1029 but after the discounts (not mail in rebates jus plain discounted price) it will cost 779 PLUs $30 in mail in rebate. the is a nice laptop i think with a 60gb hd 256ddr ram expandable to 1gb dvd/cdrw widescreen display and integrated b/g wireless and uses an amd xp-m proccessor.

my brother in law has cautioned me that compaq's may not be build the best and i should look at getting a dell. and that these build issues will make linux more difficult on a compaq vs a dell.

and well you guys are the experts so talk to me. either way its a bad ass deal i figure.

whenever i've dealt with compaq's, there were always problems with the psu. for example, i have a compaq armada laptop - sometimes it will crash, but there's no way of doing a hard reboot or poweroff. instead, i have to physically unplug it and physically remove the battery for it to shutoff. it's pretty ridiculous. a friend's desktop compaq had similar issues - sometimes it would crash and you would poweroff, then the on button wouldn't work!

i think compaq has improved a little over the years, but it's my experience that any oem computers (dell, compaq, hp, gateway...) will have some problems. the solution is to build it yourself, but in the case of laptops, that's not really possible.

if you're looking for a new computer anyway, go with the compaq. you might want to check out the HCL here on LQ for other peoples' experiences with compaq laptops.

yeah i did some searching here but got nothing on the model i was looking at but appriciate the advice