If you\'ve been holding off on the back-to-school laptop sales, you may want to pay your local Wal-Mart a visit this weekend. Starting Sunday the retailer is expected to offer a 17\" Toshiba Satellite L355 for $348.

Read the whole story

I will wait until it comes pre-loaded with a Linux Operating System, preferably Linux Mint.

I think the model is a yearish old. You're probably going to be waiting a while, heh.

Not a bad little system for my wife, who only does on-line banking and checks her email. Her current Toshiba laptop is 6 years old, but has a Celeron 1.5 Ghz CPU. Aside from being old and worried about predicted hardware failure due to age, she doesn't have any other driving need to replace it.

This is a bit of a step up from the L305 Toshiba that Best Buy was running at $299,99. It has the same CPU, GMA4500, but Vista basic, 160GB HDD and only 2GB of RAM, 15.6 " screen @ 1200 X 800. I bought one of these to show photos with, and I'm very, very happy with it. I have to say though, the extra $48.00 gets you a lot of goodies on the WalMart offering.

BTW, I installed Adobe Photoshop Elements 3,(Version 3 is 4+ yrs old), Vista complained a bit, then configured it to run as compatibility for XP SP2, and the program works perfectly.