Wich laptop to get?

[Duncan Barclay]

From: "Erik Paulsen Skaalerud" <erik at pentadon.com>

> I know, this probably has been asked a million times before, but I thought
I
> should ask this because of the acpi, or, well, the troubles with laptops
and
> FreeBSD 5.1..
>
> What is a great laptop to buy these days? I'm kind of poor, so I cant get
a
> expensive one. I need a laptop with:
> - a good GFX card (yes, I do play games on windows, I'll dual-boot)
> - space for lots of memory (1GB)
> - hopefully something faster than a 4200rpm disk. I'm considering getting
a
> laptop with USB2 interface and a external disk, and just use it via USB1
in
> FreeBSD (since it doesnt like USB2 much, yet atleast.)

I'm heartly impressed with my Acer 800CLi (it's a Centrino based machine).
The CPU is a mobile pentium at 1.3GHz, and Sandra soft benchmarks it at
around a 2GHz P4.

GFX is Radeon 9000 card, 1400x1050 screen, and very light with 5hrs battery
life. But,... the ACPI doesn't, the Cardbus doesn't and the Ethernet
doesn't. I'm working on an Ethernet driver and will get round to fixing the
Cardbus at some point (I'm partly not doing it yet so that I have an
incentive to get the Ethernet working).

Price wise, it is about the cheapest Centrino machine at £1370+vat. This may
be too much for you. If you want a fast machine, watch out for the memory
fitted. Many laptops seem to be capable of taking faster memory than they
are actually sold with. I guess they do this to keep the price down.

Duncan