Re: new laptop recommendations?
On 13 Aug 2004, John M. Flinchbaugh wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 10:18:28AM +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> On 13 Aug 2004, John M. Flinchbaugh wrote:
>>> i must buy a new notebook to replace my declining inspiron 3800.
>> My recommendation would be for an IBM laptop.
> [snip]
>> The second reason is that most of their hardware is well supported by
>> Linux, including the graphics chips (ATI or Intel) which will
> eventually
>> work with an OSS driver, even if they don't support hardware 3D
>> today[1].
>> These days you get the Centrino wireless card as well, which sucks,
> but
>> people are getting there, and Intel are now getting into an OSS driver
>> for it.
>
> i do lean towards the ati chips instead of nvidia, because i really
> don't like having to patch my source much or load binary drivers.
*nod* Also, the Intel "Extreme" graphics chips have decent Linux
support, as I understand it, and that is the new budget chip in IBM
laptops.
> what about acpi support?
I can't say, since my A31p and the R40 laptops we used all had good,
solid APM support, so I never really bothered with ACPI. :)
> it took me over 3 years to really see decent acpi support on my
> inspiron 3800. is acpi support on all hardware coming along the same,
> or am i going to buy a new machine and lose all my power management
> capabilities?
I get the feeling that it is reasonably good from postings on the
Thinkpad hardware list, but APM still works well, and I still use it
happily. :)
> that feels like one of those deep, dark things that i can't tell just
> by looking up a chipset.
*nod*
> thinkpads are attractive, but a 1.5GHz machine costs more than a
> 2.8GHz dell. that's hard to justify on a budget.
In part, I resolved this by asking myself two questions:
1. Is that actually a *fair* comparison?
That is to say, I would chose a 1.7GHz Pentium-M processor over my
1.7GHZ Pentium-4 processor any day -- the former will give much better
battery life and performance, despite the clock speeds being equal.
2. Do you actually *need* anything more?
I have a P4m-1.8 processor. Sure, it takes me ten minutes to compile a
kernel but, day to day, I get wonderful performance out of the hardware.
A faster CPU just wouldn't make that much difference to me, while a 24
hour turn-around on replacing a failing hard disk, including IBM sending
it to me by courier so I had *zero* downtime, is worth quite a bit.[1]
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] I have a RAID-1 in my laptop, so I can just remove the failed
drive, overwrite it enough to be happy, then slot in the new one.
With a single hard disk machine you would need to have backups to
make this painless since the courier is not going to hang around
for you.
--
Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion
without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without
moral passion is television.
-- Rita Mae Brown
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