The Best Laptop

[Scott Lambert]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 05:56:31AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:02:37 +0800
> > From: Erich Dollansky <oceanare at pacific.net.sg>
> > Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Nate Williams wrote:
> >
> > > (which I consider to be absolute junk), and numerous Toshibas.
> > > Note, the Toshiba's were nice, but weren't nearly as usable as the
> > > Thinkpads.
> >
> > Toshibas are only usable when they are Tecras or Porteges. I would
> > not recommend the others.
>
> Before going with a Toshiba, be sure to try the keyboard. I know
> of several people who have ditched Tecra's and I rejected them
> because of the keyboards. They often require special X hacks to avoid
> double-striking due to the excessive bouncing.

I never had that problem with my Satellite.  The only keyboard issue I
had was the up arrow would get stuck occasionally.

My new Compaq Presario keyboard sometimes seems to need the key to be
pressed harder than I think necessary to actually generate a keypress
event.  I do have a double bounce problem with the mouse buttons on this
%&# !@$% touchpad.  I want my trackpoint back.

And for the original poster.  The Compaq seems pretty solidly built;
Better than a friend's two year old Dell Inspiron (2800?) I had to clean
viruses and spyware off last week.  

My model Compaq probably doesn't qualify as the perfect FreeBSD laptop
because it is low end and only has a 1024x768 screen.  The ACPI ASL has
problems which prevent the acpi_video module from working and the last
time I tried to suspend (S3), it didn't wake up.  There have been a few
imports of acpi code since then that I haven't had a chance to try out.

For the price, I think it makes a decent FreeBSD workstation without a
lot of effort being required.  Yeah, I was shocked too.

-- 
Scott Lambert                    KC5MLE                       Unix SysAdmin
lambert at lambertfam.org       http://www.lambertfam.org/~lambert/resume.html