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I looked at that one... you can't hook up more than one computer and you can't hook up anything that's not thunderbolt.

That last one is a lie. If you had actually seen one of those Thunderbolt monitors you would have noticed that on its back there are three USB ports, one FireWire 800 port, one Ethernet port, and one Thunderbolt port for daisy-chainning. So when you get to work with your laptop you can use a single TB cable to hook it up to external USB/FireWire/TB disks, printers, keyboard+mouse, the gigabit network, and two or more external monitors (if your laptop supports them... MacBook Pros do), all running through the TB interface.

If you're going to spend $1000 on a monitor, get the Dell which has more screen space (area and pixels), and allows hooking up 5 computers and switching between them.

That's very cool. I couldn't find that monitor that allows "hooking up 5 computers" in Dell's website though, but I guess that's because they are not trying too hard to promote a very niche feature that can be obtained with fairly inexpensive gear like this or this.

My coworker picked up:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&sku=224-9949&baynote_bnrank=7&baynote_irrank=0&~ck=baynoteSearch
This monitor looks rediculously crazy large, but absolutely awesome every time I walk by his desk.

http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/laptops?~ck=mn#!facets=16260~0~195640&p=1

Could have surprised me. My laptop is the predecessor to that model, the Vostro V130n, which came with Ubuntu LTS installed on it. They're still selling them, you just have to look for it. The V130n features a Celeron U3600, 2GB of RAM, 13.3" screen (1366x768), and came originally with a 250GB hard drive. The battery life isn't that great (about 2.5h with the factory configuration), but that's because the battery is very small (slightly less than the volume of a CD jewel case). I was able to increase the battery life to 4h by swapping the hard drive with an Intel 320-series SSD. 3.2lbs with the stock configuration, and slightly lighter than that with the hard drive swapped. Total cost (including the hard drive replacement) was under $500. If they can price this ultraportable under $1000 like they're doing with the XPS 13, I would seriously consider it when it comes time to replace my current laptop. (though that'll probably be a few years, it's plenty powerful enough for everything I throw at it).

It's nice that they're doing this, and more power to them, but it's misleading to claim that they aren't supporting Linux, when you can, today, buy a reasonably nice system with Ubuntu preinstalled on it.

They've supported it just fine for a long time. It's their hardware offerings that have been spotty.

I should add: The downside of the Livescribe pen for science conferences is that if you have audio recording on all day, the battery is likely to run flat by the end of the day, unless you recharge at lunchtime. The battery is fine if you only want to record written notes, so I tend to switch on audio recording only for the important talks.

Livescribe is fine, but if you want a $100+ device you'll be able to use more than once, I recommend a Fujitsu p1620 or Dell Latitude XT

Both dual core, both tablets, similar resolutions at 1280x768/800, but p1620 has a smaller screen, 8.9", and weighs less, ~2 lbs, and is almost the exact same size as a iPad, just thicker. p1620 battery is in the front and is easily swappable, and Fujitsu sells a multicharger for it so you can charge two batteries simultaneously while using a third. Resistive screen, uses a digitizer or your fingernail, and I can confirm clicking links and opening programs works rather well with a fingernail.

Latitude XT is larger and heavier, ~4 lbs, but the 12" screen is multitouch so you can use your fingers, great for Windows 8 when it's released. But the best part about this tablet is the available external extended "slice" battery which is basically a 2nd battery that docks to the entire bottom of tablet. You should get an additional 6-8+ hours of real world usage with the slice battery, and the slice battery can be charged separately, so you could leave one charging while using another one, and being an external battery the laptop does not need to be shutdown to swap allowing you to leave the laptop on continuously forever as long as you kept swapping the external battery.

I have both tablets and they both serve their purposes, XT for all day use with external battery, p1620 for maximum portability since it's much smaller and lighter. The Dell Latitude XT can be had for about $300 from Dell and the Fujitsu p1620 is around $200 on ebay.

The manufacturing energy & strip-mining of new materials & toxic chemicals plus shipping from the other side of the planet would far-exceed anything I would save by switching to LCD or a new iCore CPU.

That's probably not true.

I've heard this kind of thing said a number of time before, for example about electric cars, the theory being that it somehow costs more energy to manufacture a battery pack than it will ever save compared to an ICE engine.

However, a simple economic analysis shows this to be false in many cases. Energy is largely fungible, that is, it doesn't really matter if you're using electricity or oil, it's all pretty much just watt-hours at some fairly equal cost. There's variances of course -- electricity is cheaper near a hydroelectric dam, oil is cheaper in some countries, and both is cheaper to buy in bulk.

Manufacturers pay for energy the same as everyone else, and they're not just going to ignore that cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's going to be baked right into the cost of manufacture. So, looking at the cost of a good gives you an idea of the maximum amount of energy it could have taken to produce. You don't need to know anything about the specifics of its manufacturing process, just the cost.

You can get a 23" Dell LED backlit LCD monitor for USD 170 delivered. Now, at most half of that is the manufacturing cost, because Dell has to pay taxes, make a profit, and this is the RRP that resellers can also make a profit on. Hence, lets say $85 manufacturing cost, including all design, materials, factory and equipment depreciation, etc... Of that, at most $40 would be energy costs, directly or indirectly, the other half would be paying for "man hours" in one way or another. These are rough numbers, but bear with me.

Now, taking that estimated $40 worth of energy, we can figure that at a typical cost of $0.15 per kWh, it cost 280 kWh of energy to make that monitor. Now, an energy efficiency review shows that that model uses 16.65W of power when on, so that means that after 9,930 hours of operation, it will have made back its own manufacturing energy cost in savings compared to your current 50W CRT. At 8 hours per day, that's just over 3 years, and you've had your CRT for 6 years.

Admittedly, this won't make it cost effective for you to personally purchase this monitor based on energy saving alone, that would take well over a decade of usage. However, it shows that it isn't wasteful environmentally to buy a new monitor, and you do get a new monitor that would look much better than your old CRT. Better colour gamut, no flicker, always perfectly sharp, no distortion, etc...

Your example of CFLs is even more clear, in which case you would be personally saving money quite quickly by switching away from incandescent bulbs. That's been true for pretty much all models of CFLs for years now, and LED lights promise to improve on those savings even further.

Let me introduce you to the Dell UltraSharp monitors: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/sna.aspx?c=us&cs=ussoho1&l=en&s=soho&~topic=ultrasharp_monitor

High-quality IPS panels that can be adjusted every which way. 24" and smaller can pivot as well.

Not terribly expensive, and if you buy them on Amazon etc. they're usually a good deal cheaper.

Before 1080p LCD's were commonplace, 1920x1200 screens were common. Now they're hard to find...

orly? Took me all of ten seconds searching...

There's a reason Dell, Apple, etc make a profit.

Please don't lump Dell in with Apple when they make all their servicing manuals available online, so I could even upgrade the five year old laptop bargain I bought.

Your Google skills are pathetic: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/monitors/topics/en/monitor_3007wfp?c=us&l=en

I had to research this to debunk/prove this for myself. Yes, Dell and Goodwill Industries have set up a partnership to arrange for the collection for second-hand PC's:

Goodwill Expansion

Individuals who drop off their computer equipment at participating ReConnect locations receive a tax receipt, regardless of the brand and condition of the equipment. Consumers are responsible for removing all personal data prior to donation. Donated equipment meeting Reconnect’s criteria will be resold, and devices in need of repair will either be refurbished or broken down into parts to be recycled by Dell partners.

No doubt.

I've never bashed (modern) Apple products on their hardware design, actual ease of use or elegance. I wan't a Mac Book Pro that isn't a Mac Book Pro so bad it hurts. I had a company issued Mac Book Pro at one point (I had to give back) and I really missed the awesome hardware. Now that Dell offers the XPS Z series and Samsung offers their rather impressive knock-offs I may just have that void fulfilled. BTW, I wouldn't trade my Acer Aspire One for a Mac Book Air, despite the fact I could trade the Air for two of mine.

I am personally a paradox, I love the Apples sleek approach to things, but I like making my own choices also. Fortunately as long as you give me the basic hardware almost all modern notebooks have and let me make some of my own choices in software setup I'm a happy camper. If Steve would have produced the hardware he did, produced the software he did, only take the padlocks off of a few things and let the users make a few extra choices for themselves Apple would in my opinion be the best thing ever.

Instead I'm sticking with PC's, Linux, Android and making my own choices while keeping a really close eye on what's happening over in the ARM world. I want an nVidia Tegra developers board so bad it hurts, it would make such an awesome car stereo with Android or a touch version of KDE on it (with a big button touch music player).

Yes,and I could wallpaper this page with link after link saying it isn't. Once again, the fact that you can't get it to work doesn't mean others can't. Linking to a joke site certainly proves your point though, thank you for that. I'm sure that clears it up for everyone. Oh, and here's another hint for you genius, the same thing holds true for Windows.

The link to theinquirer.net also certainly proves your point. Dell shipping a laptop with non-functioning drivers or software (and really old software at that) is certainly Linus's fault, cause everyone knows Dell would never even be ABLE to do that with Windows, right? Like here or here or, say, here.

As for Asus, the first article you linked explains exactly why they 'abandoned' Linux. To help you out, since reading that much text must really be hard, I'll repeat it here: “People bought the original seven- and eight-inch Eee PCs for a computer to give to the kids,” Kerr said seriously.

The last article is even funnier. Did you even read it? Did it say anything about linux being broken? Bad drivers? Things not working? Nope, none of those. Why are return rates so high? Again, let me paste it in, since reading is so challenging for you:

“Unclear selling is happening, typically online. The customer will get their netbook sent to their home and they imagine to find something like a Microsoft desktop, but they see a brown Ubuntu version. They are unwilling to learn it and they were expecting to have Windows.” Carr stressed that, in these cases, it doesn’t even matter how good or bad the Linux OS is. These customers just don’t want to try something new.

So it turns out, the return rate is so high because folks like you are too lazy or stupid to even give something a try. Go figure.

In the future, if you want to prove how the driver model is broken, or it crashes constantly, or the entire thing is 'shit', you might want to actually find some supporting articles that say that, and not something else. It's how people do this whole 'debate' thing. Argue their side, provide supporting evidence...

Just for the record though, no, I don't think Linus is 'smarter than every single OS designer in the world'. I do think he's a pretty brilliant guy (when did you write your last OS?), and I think the other THOUSANDS of people who work on, and contribute to, the Linux kernel are also by and large pretty bright guys. Brighter than you, certainly. Just the fact that you think Linus is the only person controlling kernel development proves that.

and the mac mini, you're still looking at big premiums for those systems.

MacBook Pro 17 inch

• 2.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
• 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM — 2x2GB
• 750GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Res Glossy Widescreen Display
• AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
• ntel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory

Price: $2,499.00

For small office: Dell Precision M6600 Mobile Workstation

• i7-2760QM Quad Core 2.40GHz
• 750GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
• 8X DVD+/-RW
• NVIDIA® Quadro® 3000M with 2GB GDDR5

Starting Price $3,305.00 Instant Savings $792.00 Subtotal $2,513.00

The small and medium business 2.40 GHz quad core model is the same. And for large enterprises Dell doesn't show a 17 inch laptop with a quad core i7, it shows 2 dual core 2.50 GHz i5s.

Shall I go on and post other OEM configurations and prices?

The iMac is a desktop with zero upgrade ability.

The same applies to all other all-in-ones whether Apple, Dell, HP, or any other. The same with the Mac Mini.

One thing I leared about apple computers: NEVER, EVER 'configure' your systems with apple hardware. The prices goes through the roof.

I actually agree. I've even had an Apple employee tell me that if I want more memory or a bigger disk, to buy them from someone else. Before I ordered my MBP I asked about adding more memory than the base amount and he said if I wanted more then I should get the memory from another store.

Macs are hundreds more expensive than their PC counterparts at best.

Again, look above. Mac compare pretty fairly with Windows OEM PCs, more expensive than some but cheaper than others.

Falcon

> 1996 calling, it wants it's mime back. I dare you to configure Dell, HP, and Leveno products so it will have similar specs to a Mac then compare prices. I did precisely that before ordering the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on

Are you in Europe somewhere? I just looked on the Dell site. An XPS 15,

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=mndodq4z&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&model_id=xps-l502x

is $1300. The same-speced mbp is $2000

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/configure/MD318LL/A? ... because you have to spend another $2000 to get the $1800 machine up to the same 8 GB as the xps 15". Since I have access to both these machines right now, I can also tell you that the dell monitor has better color and brightness.

Yes. We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

Apple can ask their suppliers to use conflict free minerals (which they do). But technically Steve is correct; To guarantee that the minerals were 100% conflict free (indirectly through suppliers' suppliers) is an impossible task that even Dell acknowledged.

The mining of these minerals takes place long before a final product is assembled, making it difficult, if not impossible, to trace the minerals' origins. In addition, many of the minerals are smelted together with recycled metals, and at that point it is virtually impossible to trace the minerals to their source.

The problem is hard enough for conflict free diamonds and each of those gems can be uniquely identified and separated. How do you identify the source of every single particle in a product that is smelted with other materials?

1920*1080 which is the highest consumer resolution available is around 2MP

Apple's Thunderbolt Display (and the 27" Cinema Display before it) is 2560x1440.
Dell's 27" U2711 has the same resolution (I think they may be using the same panel), and the 30" U3011 is 2560x1600.

2560*1600 which is the highest resolution available for individual displays in the market is around 4MP

The Eizo RadiForce LS560W is 3840x2160. The RX840 is 4096x2160. And although most people would not want a monochrome monitor, you can get them all the way to at least 4096x2560, like the GX1030. And that is just sticking to Eizo monitors, I didn't check other high end brands.

I get your point, but your numbers are quite off

1920*1080 which is the highest consumer resolution available is around 2MP

Apple's Thunderbolt Display (and the 27" Cinema Display before it) is 2560x1440.
Dell's 27" U2711 has the same resolution (I think they may be using the same panel), and the 30" U3011 is 2560x1600.

2560*1600 which is the highest resolution available for individual displays in the market is around 4MP

The Eizo RadiForce LS560W is 3840x2160. The RX840 is 4096x2160. And although most people would not want a monochrome monitor, you can get them all the way to at least 4096x2560, like the GX1030. And that is just sticking to Eizo monitors, I didn't check other high end brands.

I get your point, but your numbers are quite off

Something like this?

http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-duo/pd

You mean like one of these: HP EliteBook 2760p Tablet PC OR ThinkPad X200t Tablet OR Dell Latitude XT3 Tablet PC ??

All of these currently available, but they sell in really low volumes. Don't know why... I have been using a tabletpc since last 5 years due to my RSI/CTS and the convenience it offers without taking away from the laptop features. But somehow these never took off though there is some demand from niche areas. Probably, there are much less content creation people and much more content consumers than we think.

I never could find any use for the Android/iOS/WebOS tablets except the occasional need to browse the net while watching TV or while waiting/commuting etc - maybe 10-20 min a day max. Even my kids ignore the ipad lying at home - But tablets selling in millions while tabletpc languish in the low '000 !

And current tabletpc models are quite light and with great battery life - so that isn't the reason. Only thing i can see is that there's no app market to waste time with newer and newer games on these.

I think you missed his point - successful desktop OS are successful because they just work - Linux is not there yet

Funnily enough, I think he didn't miss the point. The "Linux is not there yet" poster compares later in the thread the whole Windows software package with just the Linux kernel (because Gnome 2/3 aren't OSes by themselves). Never mind that thousands of public administration and education computers in Spain run just a modified Debian (Linex -which is possibly going to disappear-, Guadalinex, Molinux) with no real problems.

And the OEM argument is flawed too: Dell offers laptops with Linux (not all over the world, mind you) and so do many other OEMs. Is that enough "it just works" for you?

http://configure.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=nb_v131l_t20_e&c=ca&l=en&s=bsd&cs=cabsdt1&model_id=vostro-v131

They do exist for less than that. The Vostro V131 is $329, for example. It's a 3.2lb 13.3" ultraportable. But you do compromise a little on the system to get it for that price: it's a celeron, and only 2GB of RAM. The battery life isn't the best, either. That said, it comes with Ubuntu preinstalled, and has a matte finish on the screen. I have the preceding version of it (the V130, bought in August), and I'm very happy with it. Much happier than I was with the Atom-based netbook I replaced.

Dell is not a Texas Corporation..
Dell is a Delaware Corporation, like about 85% of all corporations..

They have their headquarters in Texas.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/corporate/sec/Q410KFY08pdf.pdf

As a huge WebOS fan that only moved away from it because Sprint never got updated hardware, I am partial to the vertical slider. When I first saw the Dell Venue Pro (http://www.dell.com/us/p/mobile-venue-pro/pd) hardware I longed for that phone running WebOS (if you replace the dedicated smiley key on the keyboard with @). Add in a dash of microSD slot and upgrade the innards to more recent specs and I'm sold.

The catch is that nothing outside of existing Palm/HP devices fits the bill. One of the great things about WebOS is the touch area below the screen. Outside of the hardware specifically built for WebOS, nothing has that.

The Touchpad didn't have the extended swipe area, so I see no reason that any tablet (specs permitting) couldn't be a sufficient platform for WebOS. But I'm far less concerned with the tablet platform than I am with the phone platform.

It's still available on the UK site.....

actually, you can run up to 16 PCIe slots in an external chassis for heavy processing:
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-c410x/pd

Yeah, I also usually measure the equipment, both desktop and server material. The values I gave you earlier were ballparks from different measures.
A Dell LCD that draws 0.7A at 230V would be consuming 161W - That's more than a 19" CRT. I think you may have measured 0.07A (70 mA) and not 0.7A (700 mA). Check out http://www.dell.com/pt/p/dell-e170s/pd , this 17" monitor is rated at around 17W, consistent with the possibility of wrong measurement.

Apply to tech support at Dell. They're hiring dozens of techs right now. They'll probably try you out if you interview. Then you make many technical contacts (100+) for other positions.

Click on the link from TFA, then change the UK to US.

http://content.dell.com/us/en/business/d/help-me-choose/hmc-graphics-optiplex

Tah-daaaah! US now has jurisdiction, though not sure what good it'll do folks in the US. Play around with it a bit, see what other countries they're playing with.

Actually, US law does apply here.

http://content.dell.com/us/en/business/d/help-me-choose/hmc-graphics-optiplex

See that? Just change the UK in the url to US, and now US law applies. Because they're doing it in the US too.

It's called spool to tape.

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/powervault-124t-lto4hh/pd

You cant get a real backup solution at best buy for $49.00 if you have 50TB a week that is critical data then you need to buy a very large tape library system and you should have a budget for the IT department to handle the expenses.

I highly doubt the 50TB a week, I worked in a Video On Demand setting and we were dealing with adding 35TB a week to the system, but none of it was "must keep forever" data, so we did not back it up. we backed up 10% as that was what made us 80% of the money and would re-rip everything if we lost it all.

do you really generate 50TB a week that must be archived forever? How are things at the Large hadron collider?

Give me a big tablet, between 12 - 21 inches. Give me a tablet that runs windows. Give me a tablet that has a stylus, and turns off automatically touch display once the stylus goes out of it's enclosure. Give me that, for less than 700 (would pay up to 1000 for a 21")

Here you go! 23" for $599, prepare to pay less for "12 - 21 inches". Your dream came true years ago, where have you been?

Grats on skewing reality by anecdotal evidence
Now let's get back to reality.
Apple "all in one' vs Dell "all in one":

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/imac/select
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/inspiron-one

23" Dell: i5 @ 2.5Ghz, 6Gb RAM, 1Tb HDD, Intel HD Graphics - 949.99$
21.5" Apple: i5 @ 2.5Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb HDD, AMD 6750M Graphics - 1199$

And so on for most configurations.

Dell Latitude D830 http://www.dell.com/downloads/ap/products/latit/LAT_D830_1007_RF.pdf

I like ESXi for the handful of random non-production systems I use. I just don't buy that VM is the right direction for every company as a primary platform. Sure, small scale VM has it's benefits, but in a large scale scenario the overhead and vendor lock in becomes short sighted. Yes, eventually with enough VM in your datacenter, you'll save money, but at what long term expense? What's that vendor proprietary solution going to do for you in 10 years when you want to move to the next big thing? I say build out your DC using commodity hardware and design your applications and network with fault tolerance and efficiency in mind. Need a more efficient footprint? Try microservers http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-c5125/pd 1. Focus on getting the best bang for your buck with commodity hardware 2. Focus your people on streamlining operations for this model (instead of focusing on how to integrate VM with existing models, etc) 3. Design your applications/architecture around not having some magical single box with a thousand mac addresses that can move around the data center on a whim. Who would be dumb enough to believe in this model? Google and Facebook, for starters.

No not really. MAcbook Air is tiny as hell.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-duo/pd is a pad/laptop hybrid
and honestly an ipad with a BT keyboard.

I think the Grandparent never touched one.

Dell does supply a customized version of Ubuntu with the appropriate drivers and config and it works pretty well (I'm running their version of 10.10 -- no clue whether it will be updated soon). You can get it from ftp://ftp.dell.com/pub/OS if my memory serves. Don't know how easy it is to buy with no OS license as my employer purchased it and they don't have any interest in that sort of thing.

System76 and ZaReason are both good dedicated Linux laptop companies. Personally, I have a Dell n-series laptop .

A few things. First, Windows 8 will run the same apps as Windows Phone and vice versa. The metro interface with the swipe left/right just shows all the content in columns at once on a widescreen. So putting out hundreds of millions of comptuers with Windows 8 will mean that Windows Phone will benefit with the biggest app ecosystem of all of them very shortly. Those apps have been developed to run either on ARM or x86 as well. It will be buy once run on your phone, your tablet and your desktop. Not to mention they have really improved their free cloud offerings where it seemlessly syncs to things like Live for a roaming profile across any machine and with Skydrive for storage that is accessible from anything.

If you look the Dell Latitude business workhourse range just got touch on the scren standard. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/latitude-e6420/pd Future desktops will have touch screens as well. Plus, there are Windows 8 'tablets' which will dock into be a "normal" PC when at home or work and be a tablet when on the road. With real filesystems you can interact with as you'd expect and which will run all your key software. Touch in windows is definetly coming and it is a game changer - why have a limited functionality tablet and a computer when you can have one device that does both seemlessly? With a version of MS office that has both traditional and touch friendly interfaces? The hardware is only getting cheaper and will be there by release.

Btw, I came from an iPhone and now I have a Windows Phone and love it with Mango (I've been in the Beta and just got the RTM). I have also been playing with the Windows 8 beta on a multitouch Thinkpad X-series tablet.

Microsoft actually has a great and consistent strategy for once and I'll be very surprised if they are not successful here...

Those devices were far overpriced. They tried to compete with the iPad at the iPad's price point with an inferior device...Most people to this point have thought that you had to spend $500 and up for one of these little tablet internet surfing thingys.

I won't argue that that's true for a large number of devices. However, it's not true for all of them. Here's a pretty good tablet starting at $299, vs. the iPad2 starting at $499. Even though the Streak's screen is a little smaller, it's actually a pretty good device -- good enough that I wouldn't be willing to pay the extra $200 for a 3-inch larger iPad2 (and while I'm not a rabid fanboy, I do like Apple's stuff).

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/disk-drives/f/3534/t/19310219.aspx Good luck!

You're absolutely right that you can wipe out protections if you can muck with the BIOS. But computer vendors are working on solving that problem too. Did you see this: http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2011/07/22/securing-government-it-from-the-ground-up.aspx ?

Are Microsoft's customers the OEMs, or consumers. If the former, what incentives would OEMs have to pass the decision on to consumers?

Now is the time to ask them. Write to Dell, write to... no not HP,... who else is left....

Write to Dell and ask them what they plan to do. Here, I'll help get you started:
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dellcare/contact_us?c=us&l=en&s=gen&redirect=1

Think back a few years, when Dell briefly offered Linux-ready PCs.

Dell still offers Linux-ready PCs.
They have them buried in their Enterprise listing, to keep Home users from easily seeing one and buying it, then complaining that they can't run <insert game here> or Microsoft Office 2010 as is their wont, and returning it.
Any N-series Optiplex ships without Windows, and usually has FreeDOS as its OS offering.
Any N-series Precision Workstation usually gets to choose between FreeDOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The statement about machines shipping with Windows being cheaper than without it is still true.
I configured a pair of Optiplex 990s a little earlier, and the machine with Win7 Professional, 64-bit was about $300 cheaper than the machine with FreeDOS, with as much hardware matching as I could do.
I even added on the completecare warranty to the Windows machine to try closing the gap, which just didn't do enough justice.

There are various data recover apps out there for this purpose. The problem is complicated by files being zipped. it is possible to dump the files as binary images then manually edit the binaries of the individual files in a hex editor etc. so that the can be read by software that works with a given format. However, I'm not sure if or how well that will worked with compressed files. Are they encrypted as well?
The problems are not 'unsolvable' but can very quickly move into the realm of needing a supercomputer and a other specialized equipment.

There are of coarse companies that do this professionally and charge $$ for it , how much are the files worth.

following are few things that might help out. Good luck.

http://content.dell.com/us/en/slgov/slg-solutions-digital-forensics.aspx?ST=forensics%20recovery%20software&dgc=ST&cid=69093&lid=1744642&acd=snYi17OBJ,7688660482,901rb36697

http://www.x-ways.net/

http://www.winhex.com/winhex/

Thank you. But when I used the shortcut dell.com/ubuntu, it was telling me "No configurations are valid for the chosen filters." And even with your query, Dell's search appears to be broken, as several of the results list only "Genuine Windows® 7" in available operating systems.

Dell no longer sells new Ubuntu PCs.

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=ubuntu&cat=all&x=0&y=0

But you didn't really buy it, you licensed the use and Dell still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it.

It's called a lease and lots of people do it.

http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/vostro-v130/pd

You can get it for 1/3 the cost of an equivalent MacBook Air, and it's about the same weight, and the screen's the same size. The battery doesn't last quite as long (I get about 4h on mine), but if cost is an issue, then it's definitely an option. And to make it germane to the discussion at hand: you can get it with Linux preinstalled.

The model you linked to is as little as $379. Of course that's a Celeron processor. The mid line is $578 and has an i3 processor at 1.33 GHz. None of the models you linked to have flash rather than HDD. The only one to support 4gb of ram is $699. So let's assume you meant to say the 4gb model for $699, which is about half the price of the MB Air 13.3 base model. Because you weren't trying to compare something so drastically different just to say "look, OMG! cheaper!). So, other than being half the cost, the ONLY things you give up are:

* About half the battery life.
* Trade a 1.7 i5 processor for a 1.3 i3 processor.
* Trade 128gb SSD for 500gb SATA drive at 7200 RPM (no wonder the battery life suffers).
* 1366x768 resolution versus 1400x900.
* Half a pound heavier.
* Noticeably thicker.
* Slightly longer, slightly wider.

To be fair, the Dell has a few extra ports (although no Thunderbolt), and has that hideous red plastic option. It also ships with ad supported Word and Excel. To get Pages and Numbers on the Mac would cost $40 in the App Store, although you lose the ads.

And if it does come with Linux pre-installed as an option, than you linked to the wrong model, because your link is Windows 7 only.

How is this equivalent, and 1/3 the price?

If I had the funds, I would just get a Mac Book Air, or a Lenovo X1 and be done with it.

http://www.dell.com/ca/business/p/vostro-v130/pd

You can get it for 1/3 the cost of an equivalent MacBook Air, and it's about the same weight, and the screen's the same size. The battery doesn't last quite as long (I get about 4h on mine), but if cost is an issue, then it's definitely an option. And to make it germane to the discussion at hand: you can get it with Linux preinstalled.