How do Dell-Notebooks work with FreeBSD (video/audio/wlan)?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

I have a Dell Latitude D800 under FreeBSD 5.3.  This Dell was, I think, 
not quite the latest as I bought it on sale.

The GeForce FX Go5200 with the 1680x1050 screen (I think that I have the 
older version of the screen) works well with the nv driver, although I 
had to do some googling to find the mode line for that resolution.  I 
could never get the nvidia driver to work - it would always make the 
computer freeze, although someone else told me that they could get it to 
work with FreeBSD 4.x.

The sound works, but I haven't listened to it enough to decide if it is 
really good.

The Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card works somewhat with the 
ndis0 driver, but the only way to get it to work is to put the 
appropriate commands in /etc/rc.conf and reboot - I haven't found a way 
to make it work without the reboot.  But with the reboot I was able to 
get it to work.

Overall a pleasant experience, but the road wasn't totally smooth in 
getting it to work.

Stephen