Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2002 12:34:23 -0800 From: Dave Tweten <tweten@nas.nasa.gov> To: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> Cc: mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: using a laptop as a main machine Message-ID: <2989.1036701263@gilmore.nas.nasa.gov>
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bakul@bitblocks.com said: >So some questions for people who mainly use a laptop and lug it around >everywhere: what features do you find most useful? 1. A battery that lasts a reasonable length of time. My ThinkPad X21 battery lasts almost as long as the spec says. My late NEC's battery only lasted about half as long as expected (which is to say it lasted only about a quarter the time specified). 2. All rechargable batteries rot, but they should rot slowly, and newly manufactured ones should be available. The final straw that sent my NEC to the network in the sky was the only replacement batteries I could buy when one rotted were batteries that had themselves rotted in inventory. 3. Wireless networking support for whatever system you might have available. We have 802.11b and my X21's PCCard slot lets me use an Orinoco card. 4. If you want to leave your laptop on all the time, then you need a good APM BIOS. My ThinkPad is a little disappointing in this regard. It does suspend well, but standby wedges it, and cron jobs suffer from severe slowdowns that I think have to do with CPU Idle processing. I would love to be able to bracket my cron scripts with apm commands to go fast for the duration. Warts and all, I count my switch to exclusive laptop use several months ago to be a success. Good luck on yours. -- M/S 258-5 | 1024-bit PGP fingerprint: | tweten@nas.nasa.gov NASA Ames Research Center | 41 B0 89 0A 8F 94 6C 59 | (650) 604-4416 Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000 | 7C 80 10 20 25 C7 2F E6 | FAX: (650) 604-4377 We each earn what freedom of speech we defend for those who most offend us. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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