Date: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 16:34:11 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Latest laptop recommendations Message-ID: <4.2.0.58.19991206161653.03e8cdf0@localhost>
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My old ThinkPad 760E is just about to go out of warranty, and given the
number of times it has been to the shop it will not pay to maintain it the
next time it malfunctions. It also has a number of serious design flaws.
It's cursed with a power management system that doesn't work very well;
even Windows won't survive a suspend/resume, though it's supposed to. The
docking station ("Ultradock II") must have been designed by a hand surgeon
who wanted more carpal tunnel work; it lifts the keyboard nearly 4 inches
off the desktop. The thermal design is ludicrous; in the dock, the heat
pipe which is supposed to cool the machine rests against the dock and gets
no air circulation. The hard disk rests against the back of the RAM module
and can overheat it. The machine contains an MWave DSP that serves as both
sound chip and modem and does neither well (it doesnt function at all under
FreeBSD). The Trident Cyber display adapter provides virtually no
acceleration under X Windows. Finally, it can't hold both a floppy drive
and a CD-ROM drive at once, and swapping is awkward.
I'm therefore looking for recommendations for a replacement. The new unit
should have a 15" LCD, and should have hardware that's compatible with
FreeBSD, XFree86, and OSS. Many new systems have Rockwell or Lucent
"lobotomodems" that only run under Windows, or sound chips like the ESS
Maestro which don't do SoundBlaster emulation without a special companion
chip that's being left out of many machines now. (I hear that the
commercial version of OSS supports the Maestro only partially. It doesn't
provide wavetable MIDI, making it much less useful for music.) Some display
chips, such as NeoMagic's, don't seem to have good X support, and I want to
avoid these. I'd also like to find a system with a dock or port extender
that really works, as well as suspend/resume that is compatible with FreeBSD.
So far, the best candidate I've found is the Gateway Solo 9150 -- not their
latest model, nor their fastest (the 9150 has a 333 MHz Celeron). But it
seems to use supported chipsets. Does anyone have experience with this
model? With others that are worth considering?
--Brett Glass
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