I haven't seen much signs of business cooling off and this pretty much confirms it. I am sure there are industries that are in a slump (building for example) and possibly auto sales but tech seems to be a horse even the small software vendors seem busy, sorry no bad news here yet.

HP are big, BIG supporters of Debian.

Debian is the Linux distro fo choice for most sysadmins.

I will buy HP first because their support for Debian means that it is virtually guaranteed to be compatible and therefore reliable.

It's about time that these suppliers realised that the IT world is run by the penguin loving geeks - and we will choose those who support us.

Also, for us, laptops are bought from Dell because they support Ubuntu. If HP were to bring out laptops with Ubuntu or Debain pre-installed then they will be chosen first.

I think HP have cottened to to how it works - the other manufacturers are going to have to catch up to compete.