amd64 laptop recommendations

[Ville-Pertti Keinonen]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 11:42 -0500, Michael W. Oliver wrote: 
> Good morning folks!
> 
> I am in the market for an AMD64-based laptop, and am currently leaning
> toward the Acer Ferrari 3400, but would like to borrow a few minutes of
> your time to ask for suggestions on something better.

The Ferrari 3400 is probably a decent choice.  I have a Ferrari 3200
myself, which is mostly the same except for the slower processor, and it
works well with FreeBSD.  I've been using it for almost 6 months now.

FreeBSD/amd64 works well - X (except for 3D accel.), built-in ethernet,
audio, bluetooth, even the built-in card reader.

Under FreeBSD/i386, the builtin wireless interface also works (with
if_ndis).

There are some cons, though - the viewing angle isn't particularly good,
colors are bluish, and battery life is non-existent (it should be
improved for the 3400 according to specs, though).

The design and build quality are ok for a PC laptop, but compared to my
previous laptop (a PowerBook), it seems big, ugly and cheap.  I mainly
bought it for the amd64 processor and the decent screen resolution.

> o CPU - AMD64 3200+ (2.0 Ghz)

The specs on Acer's web page claim Mobile AMD64 3000+ (that could be
2GHz, though, depending on the cache size).