New computers

My computer's been doing its crashing thing even more often than usual recently and as part of my attempts to deal with it I attempted to delete the Content.IE5 folder that's where IE caches web pages, since sometimes I get viruses in that folder. Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to delete anything atm - either in normal mode or safe mode which is slightly concerning in itself. My other problem is that I've only got 402MB of space left on my hard drive - my HD is 5.58GB. It being a laptop that almost certainly doesn't have USB2, an external hard drive wouldn't run on it and I believe fitting a new internal hard drive to be fairly tricky/complicated - I'm not even sure that there's the right kind of slot to fit it in.

So I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe it is time to buy myself a new computer and I need some help.

My requirements - must be a laptop - I need to be able to transport it and I'm not going to be living anywhere large enough for a desktop in the near future.

Must be something that I can install some version of Linux on (probably debian - but am open to other suggestions).

Preferably will be dual Windows XP/some sort of Linux (but am open to argument that it's best to make the leap straight from Windows to Linux).

Must be compatible with ADSL (I'm guessing this won't be a problem 'cos it'll come with an ethernet card which I connect to a router which I can then connect to the ADSL).

Must be powerful enough for me to use it for building a large database + associated stuff to do with programming eg. writing website pages that pull information from the database.

I don't play computer games (beyond solitaire etc) so no need for particularly fast graphics. I will be doing some editing of pictures - I believe Photoshop is the best software for this, though I tend to do my editing in Paint/Microsoft Photo Editor.

[Poll #507301]

New computers

My computer's been doing its crashing thing even more often than usual recently and as part of my attempts to deal with it I attempted to delete the Content.IE5 folder that's where IE caches web pages, since sometimes I get viruses in that folder. Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to delete anything atm - either in normal mode or safe mode which is slightly concerning in itself. My other problem is that I've only got 402MB of space left on my hard drive - my HD is 5.58GB. It being a laptop that almost certainly doesn't have USB2, an external hard drive wouldn't run on it and I believe fitting a new internal hard drive to be fairly tricky/complicated - I'm not even sure that there's the right kind of slot to fit it in.

So I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe it is time to buy myself a new computer and I need some help.

My requirements - must be a laptop - I need to be able to transport it and I'm not going to be living anywhere large enough for a desktop in the near future.

Must be something that I can install some version of Linux on (probably debian - but am open to other suggestions).

Preferably will be dual Windows XP/some sort of Linux (but am open to argument that it's best to make the leap straight from Windows to Linux).

Must be compatible with ADSL (I'm guessing this won't be a problem 'cos it'll come with an ethernet card which I connect to a router which I can then connect to the ADSL).

Must be powerful enough for me to use it for building a large database + associated stuff to do with programming eg. writing website pages that pull information from the database.

I don't play computer games (beyond solitaire etc) so no need for particularly fast graphics. I will be doing some editing of pictures - I believe Photoshop is the best software for this, though I tend to do my editing in Paint/Microsoft Photo Editor.

[Poll #507301]