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http://www.discountlaptops.com/ sells laptops without operating systems.

You beat me to it; Sager sounds like what the submitter is looking for. I had a good experience buying a Sager from http://www.discountlaptops.com/ . Like lots of small online stores, their score on resellerratings.com is great and they don't force you to buy Windows.

Maybe he's not playing games and using it for work, like me.

I have a Sager 5690, high end laptop that I bought almost two years ago (from http://www.discountlaptops.com/ highly recommended!), and I use it for development work. It's loaded and great for heavy development, and when I need to go into the office (or to a client's site), I just pack it up and bring it with me. I got it with a P4 3.2, 2GB ram, high resolution display, *2* years ago, for about $2500. It was a no-brainer for me. I'm still using it for work to this day, and it still out performs most other laptops on the market. Granted, it weighs like 8 pounds and isn't for a lot of travel, but it's perfect for my needs.

Take care,
-Frank

ASUS notebooks are widely available in the USA.

The reason you don't see them much is because many are rebranded by the resellers. Those not rebranded (the ASUS Ensemble line) suffer from lack of major marketing.

are just a FEW of the many USA based online resellers who offer ASUS laptops.

Discountlaptops.com says:

IBM buys from Quanta and and Arima.

http://discountlaptops.com/index.php?section=catag ory&include_type=ourbrands

I bought my laptop (A Sager 5690 - model no longer sold on their site) from http://www.discountlaptops.com/, and I couldn't be happer with it. No operating system, great value, and excellent customer service. I also paid about $1,000 less for my laptop than I would have paid if I bought it from Dell (P4 w/hyperthreading, 2GB ram, 1400x1050 LCD, over a year ago). If you don't believe me read their buyer ratings at the bottom of their web site. I actually had to return my laptop for repairs because of a faulty motherboard, and they paid for all the shipping and had my laptop back to me in a few days. The owner of the company emailed me several times before I bought the laptop and answered questions I had about it (like what ethernet chip it had), and made *objective* suggestions about which laptop I should buy. The owner also contacted me several times during my warranty work episode and I felt extremely comfortable that he was making sure that I was well taken care of by Sager. (Sager and Chembook are two of the main manufacturers that they sell on their site. These are the companies that sell to places like Alienware, Hypersonic PC, Pro-star, Voodoo PC and many others. I'm running Ubuntu Hoary on it now, and have not had any problems at all. Before this I ran Fedora Core 2 and 3 with no problems (save the faulty motherboard).

I can't recommend discountlaptops.com enough. I don't work for them or anything like that, I am just a happy, happy customer. You can bet my next laptop will be from them as well.

...There are only a few vendors out there that offer lappies w/o the MS tax.

Care to name some? I'll name the ones I know:

http://discountlaptops.com

http://www.emperorlinux.com

Please help expand my list.

Almost all of these "gaming laptops" are Sagers with a slick paint job and a huge markup. The Fragbook DR is actually a Sager NP8790 which you can get at places like Discount Laptops and Power Notebooks with the same specs and much, much cheaper.

Kinda sorta. Alienware and Sager both sell Clevo laptops. Sager sells a better variety of Clevos though. The one in particular that I'm looking at has a 256mb Radeon in it, and can be had with a RAID 0 array. In a freakin laptop!! Here's a link

You can buy them retail. The markup isn't really even that hefty compared to an "untough" system. Best of all, that particular reseller will bundle Linux/no-OS with their systems.

You might be able to find what you're looking for on this pages's semi-rugged laptops. There are laptops from the Panasonic ToughBook CF sereis on there.

• Discount Laptops Note the "Optional Operating System" bit...
• PowerNotebooks.com even has pre-installed linux on selected models, if you want. Build your own system and you don't have to have an OS installed at all.

I'm sure there are more out there... Just pop over to ResellerRatings.com and search for notebook or laptop.

Discount Laptops is another online vendor that sells laptops made by the same ODMs that provide Dell, Toshiba, and others with their laptops. The good thing about this is that the ODMs don't put Windows on their machines.

There's some really sweet white-box laptop deals available from http://www.discountlaptops.com, including some tasty Sager notebooks. A friend of mine at work just got one, and it's really nice...I'd have no qualms about getting one if I didn't already have an office-issued Latitude (and I might just pick one up for my next home PC anyway). All of the computers at that site are available with no OS by default. I'm not sure if/when that will change, but it's definitely a nice option for you now.

As for Linux interoperability, Linux-laptop.net had a few writeups about getting Linux running on some older Sager models, but nothing on the latest product line. I'd be very interested to know if anyone's tried this, how well it worked, and how much driver-tweaking and hair-pulling was involved in the process.

For more info, check out DiscountLaptops and PowerNotebooks. It's a shame that laptops are much more expensive in the UK and that our Tier 3 vendors only seem to sell ASUS (in the case of Hi-Grade) and Clevo. Both of which are OK, but it'd be nice to have a few alternatives.

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