The Best Laptop

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: des at des.no (Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?q?Sm=F8rgrav?=)
> Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 00:01:16 +0200
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> Bruce M Simpson <bms at spc.org> writes:
> > On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:48:07PM -0500, Jason Dusek wrote:
> > > I am in the market for a new laptop and I would like to know which
> > > laptop is the best for running FreeBSD and which one has the easiest
> > > setup.  Any suggestions?
> > The IBM ThinkPad T40 is currently rocking my world.
> 
> The ThinkPad series has a long history of bad batteries, buggy BIOSes
> and AMLs, and idiosyncratic hardware which often requires a DOS or
> Windows utility to enable / disable / configure.  I'd recommend a Dell
> Latitude (not Inspiron!) instead.

I've been using ThinkPads for FreeBSD for several years. 570, 600E, and
T30. All have run well, although the 600E did have a problem with
batteries. (IBM was happy to send me replacements, though.)

They do require a DOS utility to adjust BIOS, although that is largely
gone with recent models and ACPI.

I have had little problem with buggy BIOS with APM, but I did need
to upgrade to get ACPI to work properly on my T30. It's been fine for
over a year, now and the biggest issue turned out to be and error in the
ACPI code in FreeBSD which was also fixed LONG ago. I have never had
hardware problems with any of them and the IBM support and service have
always been simply excellent. (See battery comment above.)

I have historically found ThinkPads to be excellent systems for FreeBSD,
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634