I don't know if this is the right place for this, but my Inspiron 1200 just died, and I need somthing new. I need a laptop that is under $400 and can run Minecraft with a crapload of mods, like 124 at last count. I don't care about the preloaded OS, if it's windows, than I'll either dual-boot or Virtualbox Ubuntu or Kali. A TPM to make Bitlocker or similar happy would be nice, but I can manage without. The under $400 is top priority as that's all I have in the budget.

Any suggestions? If this is the wrong section or there's a better forum to check on, please tell me.

Where do you live?

Opps, stupid on my part. I've never left the US in my entire life

I bought a second hand "Lenovo T520" (with Win7).
I putted Debian7 as parallel boot.
Good machine & robust.
We are 99 of the time in Debian (in Win7 only for some weird programms..).
I dont know anything about minecraft.

That is actally a pretty good laptop. Let's see what I can get on ebay...

Latitudes always Latitudes


***yes I'm a broken record***

My brother had a Latitude with a dead CMOS battery and tried to make me fix it. Never again.

I have had good luck with mine and paid 50 bucks used for it (minus hard drive and a/c charger) . The touchscreen works with newer kernels. Mine is complete now and is a daily runner.

Link

Rugged Version

No internal CD or DVD drive though (external usb drive works just fine). Wifi is intel N chip.

My wife likes her Link with 8 gig of ram, 500 gig ssd, I5, Windows 7 Enterprise laptop.
Boots fast, runs good also.

I've also had great luck with Latitudes. I currently have 3, and I've had another dozen or so in the past. Loved almost all of them, and every time I need a new laptop, the first thing I look at is Latitudes.

My wife is extremely impressed with her new Thinkpad E450, and I must admit the keyboard is fantastic for a laptop keyboard. But that's a bit out of your price range.

The HP stream 11 makes an alright linux* machine.

* 3.19+ kernel for the clickpad.
* wifi driver needs new stuff to be semi-reliable. Which makes an initial install rough if you don't have a 2nd machine or a usb to ethernet option. Bluetooth is tied into the wifi chipset and I'm not sure if that works.

I've gotten everything to work, except bluetooth which I have nothing to test with. The video card buffer is large enough to let you have a virtual display of 4k x 4k. Only $200-ish so you could almost get 2 at $400. Not the gaming machine that you desire, but something to hold you over if you're trigger shy. You can get to UEFI and the boot external device option by spamming the ESC key directly below the power button which is nice as you never have to boot the windows 8 that comes with it. It has a built in card reader, but it doesn't appear to be bootable. In the used market you could do better of course.

Bluetooth does work at least partially, at least on Debian and Mageia (only 2 distro's I've used on it). I was able to connect to bluetooth headsets, I was not, however, able to connect to my phone.
Initial install isn't too bad if you use an OS that's not completely FOSS. For instance, Mageia includes the Broadcom-STA drivers on the live disk, but not installed. So you can simply install them and use it live without issue, or install it to the device and use it out of the box without issues.

Drivers do need improvement, but in my experience (with both Mageia and Debian having the exact same behavior), they work great for ~5 minutes, then don't work or barely work for 5 minutes, then they work fine after that, with no major issues except the occassional disconnect (which resets the 5 minutes working/non-working after reconnecting).

I actually carry a stream 11.6 around with me to work just to play with so that I can get away from Windows at work.

Hey, I've got a five or six year old inspiron that runs minecraft just fine unless I spend too much time playing on a real computer and get used to real frame race, and if that old hunk of junkcan play Minecraft, anything can (except my broken inspiron 1200, or my honest to got Pavilion 8570c that still runs 98FE)

EDIT: and you think carrying around a laptop to run linux on os fun? Try my MyPassport rig. 100 gb for NTFS, 2gigs for boot, and an entire encrypted system

I've had good luck with Dells (though Dell's Broadcom wireless fetish is annoying) and one of the members of my LUG buys only Lenovos.

The last three devices I've bought, though, have been Zareasons and I've been very happy with them. I can recommend my Strata laptop without hesitation.

I use the rtlwifi_new sources from github for the wifi driver. With the firmware from kernel.org's git. Which has a new version as of July (this month) for my chipset (rtl8723befw.bin). The previous firmware had me reloading the kernel module daily for a stable connection, but this version seems pretty rock solid on a 4.0.1 kernel. Although I've heard that only the broadcom driver supports bluetooth. And by stable I mean that the connection doesn't drop or stop working, I'm sure the signal strength is still pretty low.

I might test that sometime, but if it doesn't include bluetooth, I'll go ahead and stick to the STA drivers for day to day usage.

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