Re: Please recommend a machine
On 2001-08-14 Jaime Bemaras <jbemaras@redsonic.com> wrote:
> Hello list,
Hello Jaime,
> I am looking to acquire a laptop. I will need a dual boot system
> because my university only supports MS software (don't get me
> started).
I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 8000, and for now I am very happy
with it.
> Here's my whishlist:
>
> - AMD processor preferred.
Hum... I don't think Dell ships its laptops with AMD processors. Only
Intel I fear. BTW the motherboard is an Intel i815.
> - Touchpad preferred (I hate eraser-style mice)
The i8000 has both of them! This also means two sets of buttons,
which is quite handy.
> - Active Matrix with 1024x768 or better resolution
Active Matrix 15" SXGA+ (ie. 1400x1050). Sharp display, very
comfortable. The display can be stretched to fit the whole screen;
quite awful for 1280x1024 (very sad aliasing), but fine for 1024x768.
> - Room for a lot of RAM
Up to 512 Mb I believe.
> - DVD (DVD/CD-RW combo?) (even if swappable)
The i8000 is equipped with an "optical bay" for which you can choose
at buy-time almost any combination of cd-rom, cd-rw and dvd. It also
has a "media bay"; by default it holds a removable floppy drive that
you can replace with whatever you like (battery, HDD, DVD...).
> - A big HD
Mine is 20 Gb. At the time I bought my laptop there were also 32 Gb
HDDs available. IIRC even 48 Gb is possible.
> - Obviously, Debian supported hw (sound, modem, etc.)
My i8000 has a NVidia GeForce2 Go video card, which is unfortunately
not supported in xfree 3.3.6 (had to use framebuffer, quite slow). I
recently upgraded to xfree 4.0.3 (from unstable), and everything works
fine with the proprietary driver from NVidia. There is nevertheless a
bug in the current driver: killing then restarting X hangs the laptop.
The modem is a winmodem (ActionTec), compatible with the semi
open-source ltmodem driver. The modem is coupled with an eepro100
compatible network card.
Sound works perfectly (maestro3 module).
Other hardware includes 2 USB ports and PCMCIA slots that I have not
tried to configure (no use for now).
Hope this helps,
Andréas
--
Andréas Saudemont <andreas.saudemont@laposte.net>
Reply to: