Well two months back I bought my first laptop. A Compaq V3155AU with following configuration:

AMD Turion64 (single core) 2.0Ghz

Hyper Threading support

512MB DDR2 system memory (I upgraded that to 1GB)

nVidia 6150 graphics chip-set with shared memory

14.1” display

60GB SATA hard disk drive

DVD/CD R+RW

Bluetooth

Ethernet

Wireless Lan

At sub Rs. 40,000 (sub US$ 900) this was a great deal. I was using Fedora Core 6 (64bit edition) on it but was not using it much since I still love my desktop and do not have enough work to justify simultaneous usage of two computers. Recently my friend planned to join me on web development work and I thought this was a good time to use it regularly. So I had to first make sure the Wireless Lan worked since I Fedora had not done that automatically. I read:

“Compaq Presario V3000 with Ubuntu 6.06” and it helped a lot. Actually I got the Wireless Lan running in no time. It was very easy. If after a shutdown or restart you need to connect just use the usual commands (iwconfig, iwlist, dhclient to scan for network, connect, etc.).

I setup up my usual structure for web projects. PHP was already there, so was Apache. A few needed PHP modules were added (APC, MagickWand for ImageMagick) and I had a working local web server !!!

Things are really that easy if you are using the right software :) and there is always Google to help you when need it.