[geeks] Big-screen PC Laptop suggestions?

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Writes Hicheal Morton, inter alia...

> One question: Why don't you consider purchasing one in Europe?  (Just
> curious.)

Several reasons:

I'm hoping for a recent, gently-used machine rather than a new one, to save
a little money.

Sales taxes in France are about 20%, and US$->Euro conversion rates suck, so
I'd expect computers over there to be much more expensive for us than they
are here. 

She wants a US keyboard, and I'd expect the laptops in France would mostly
have French keyboards. We'll take a Quebecois one to plug in if she has to
do any great amount of writing in French.  A real French keyboard ia AZERTY
rather than QWERTY; the Quebecois one is QWERTY, but has all the French
accented characters, French quotation marks, etc.

New machines come with Vista, and we'd rather have XP.

I'd like to be able to set it up here, where I have all the "stuff."

-Shel

PS:  If you ever have to do a lot of Western European language work, look
into getting a Swiss keyboard.  It's got all the special stuff for German,
French and Italian, albeit at the cost of "double bucky" shift sequences for
some of the less common characters.

PPS:  I'm assuming that the Quebecois keyboard is still supported, since XP
lists three "Canadian" keyboards, two of which are specifically Canadian
French.