Hi,
I am really new at buying a laptop computer. I currently have a Asus X43u with DVD Drive, 3 USB Ports, a HDMI port and a cable port for internet. It's running Open Suse 13.1 and uses Network Manager to manage WIFI and cable internet. This system dual boots Microsoft Personal 7 using a boot option. I want to be able to replace this laptop perhaps with a more up version of Microsoft OS such as 8 or 10. Can anyone suggest a laptop sub $800 (Australian Dollars) that would allow me to dual boot both systems?

Just asking because I have no idea of what questions I should ask at the computer store.

Thanks for any help.

Newbie.

newbiest_user,

You know what laptops are available in Australia and I am afraid that I don't. You need to do your own research locally within your price bracket.

This is a very general article that I found from Gizmodo Australia:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/bu...-need-to-know/

You sound like you have a pretty good dual-boot setup with W7 and openSUSE 13.1 at the moment.

Why is there a need to throw $800 at a "solution"?

I would hesitate at recommending W10, since out of all MS's systems I like W7 the best but that is a personal preference.
Nevertheless, you can upgrade from W7 to W10 for free if you wish, but you have about another 10 months in which to take up that offer.

Another idea would be to use Linux on your existing laptop and have W8.1/10 on your new one.

The person in the computer shop is unlikely to have heard of Linux, unless you are really lucky.
You could be very cheeky and take your openSUSE 13.1 DVD (or USB stick) with you to the shop and ask them to boot a demo machine.

It is important to check that the laptop's wifi works with Linux in addition to any other hardware.

Do try and obtain precise details of the exact chipset which is used in any particular laptop.

Some Realtek ones are noted here:

https://sites.google.com/site/easyli...ject/reserve-7

There can be major compatibility problems with wifi in Linux, so do be careful and use Google to find out whether a particular chipset will work, possibly after some tweaking.

Of course you can always fit a Linux-friendly USB wifi adaptor but this is often unsatisfactory because of potential loss, damage and theft.

I also don't recommend Win. 10. It installs various programs without asking you, like Microsoft OneDrive for cloud storage. In fact, when I "downgraded" from 10 to 7, the amount of free space on my hard drive jumped from 23 to 41 GB. A final note- when going through the "welcome aboard" slideshow for Office 365, practically every slide mentioned OneDrive. That should make you wonder- why do they insist on you using their programs?

my advice: buy a cheap laptop (all of them are preloaded with window 8 or 10) and turn the asus into a linux-only machine. recent windowses have partition manager included, so if redmond decides it is time to ruin linux, it might do so... also, uefi is not very linux friendly.

windows and linux used to live on a disk together like cat and dog, but with windows 8 or over, it's more like david and goliath. and here, goliath has all the stones....

microsoft has turned uefi booting in a way to keep linux out. only the linuxes that have bought a uefi boot code from microsoft are allowed on the same disk. for as long as microsoft allows them to. or changes the uefi booting.

My recent experiences are:

toshiba is bad, since they prefer to walk on the leash of microsoft too much.,
acer is fine since they have a good BIOS but rather flimsy hardware
HP is fine for hard- and software
Lenovo has a seperate powerup button to enter the BIOS

Some reading here: Linux on an i3 machine