We got our free laptop yesterday. Every Year 9 student in a public school in NSW (A state in Australia) got/get's one. But yes, there's a catch. You *can't* install anything, D(epartment)(of)E(ducation)(and)T(raining) Portal filtering is enforced even at home. Though it does come with Adobe CS5 and Office 2010.

But anyway, we got a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 11, 1.07ghz, 2gb, Windows 7 Enterprise and supposedly 160gb hard drive.

Also:

Oh god, that wouldn't last for me at all, that laptop would be back in their hands in no time. :/

If you break it, you pay for it.

Who said I was going to break it? I'd bloody give it back to them and tell them to keep it. :/ No way I would use that thing with those restrictions.

Oh, sorry, I misread back as break But you pretty much have to have it, It's going to (or should be) used in all classes.

Ugh.. That sucks, but so long as you only use it for school work and have your own personal computer to use for other things.. Still sucks though. :/

Is that proc a single or dual core?

Dual core. Also, mine says that only 1.89gb of the RAM can be used, and Windows 7 uses ~800-900MB on it's own.

Ah, that is -slightly- better than I first though, but those specs are really pretty.. low. :/ Especially running windows 7.

I'm interested to know if there are any GUI changes between office '07 and '10.

I run those specs . Though I recently bumped it up to 3gb of ram. I am curious if you could put Linux on it and go around the restriction (if you even want to do that)

SAX chat is stuffed up on the laptop. Good thing this laptop doesn't block intranet, you can run a proxy

Run Ubuntu off a live CD or USB to get around that.

No CD drive, and I haven't tried a USB, but I can tell you now, it'll be locked off by the BIOS.

Yeah, I would suggest dual-booting it too...

Wow, that's pretty awful. May I suggest using Wubuntu (or wubi, I think). It allows you to dual boot with windows partition. I've used it before, but I already had linux on this machine, so it went away quickly :/

Hmm, how exaclt is the block working even at your house? if it is a file that does that, try to find/delete it

_player: Wubi is a very unreliable way to dual-boot, in my experience. If you just install Ubuntu normally, it will happily configure dual-booting, no Wubi needed.

Yes, but he said that his computer can't do CDs and probably can't boot from USB. Wubi was another alternative for it.

But the BIOS is locked....

Filtering is done through ISP at school. At home it's done by Blue Coat Proxy. The device also has Computrace.

I'm not familiar with Computrace; what's that?