Sager NP9750 notebook pseudo-review

[Michael W. Lucas]

There's always someone asking about notebooks here, so I figured I'd
post my experiences with my new Sager NP9750.

This machine has a beautiful 17" screen, comfortable keyboard,
dual-core AMD64 CPU, keypad, four USB ports, two firewire ports,
dual-layer DVD burner, dual-head video (there's an external port for
you add-on monitor), four slots for external flash/SD/etc cards,
built-in 802.11G wireless and Realtek gigE, and a subwoofer.

In car terms, it's pretty much a Hummer; you almost expect it to be
delivered upon the backs of a team of slaves specially chosen by dint
of their success in lugging rocks for the Pyramids.  Definitely not a
road warrior machine.  Fortunately, I wanted a DTR.

The important thing is, how does it run FreeBSD?  I installed the
December 7.0 i386 snapshot, and got:

http://www.blackhelicopters.org/~mwlucas/sagernp9750dmesg.txt

Overall, not bad at all.  Some points:

* x.org 6.8 did not recognize the video card, and I had to download
the patch to update the ports tree to x.org 7.0.  Once I did that, X
came right up.

* The touchpad gets some getting used to.  The touchpad has a built-in
scroll pad on the right side, which worked right out of the box.
What's more, if you hit the corners of the scroll bar just right, X
picks that up and (depending on where my focus is in Windowmaker)
either knocks me forward or back a virtual screen or acts as a
back/forward button in Firefox.  Not sure if this is FreeBSD's moused
or x.org, but still nice that it Just Works.

* Lots of stuff hooked up via USB, and lots of connections that just
aren't hooked up to anything.  The dmesg shows four USB "devices" that
just aren't there, and fill up the dmesg with gripes.  I suspect that
these are the four-in-one card reader.

* an unrecognized USB device that I suspect is the integrated USB
webcam:

ugen0: vendor 0xeb1a product 0x2750, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 2

Will have to investigate that in my copious free time.

* linuxpluginwrapper-20051113 doesn't work.  It seems that I'm not the
only one that has broken for, so I'm not too worried.

* Fans.  Lots of fans.  ACPI seems to work well enough to turn them on
and off as needed, though.

So, if you're in the market for a luggable DTR, I"d recommend it.  Got
mine through powernotebooks.com, delivered quickly, good price.

==ml

-- 
Michael W. Lucas	mwlucas at FreeBSD.org, mwlucas at BlackHelicopters.org
		http://www.BlackHelicopters.org/~mwlucas/

"The cloak of anonymity protects me from the nuisance of caring." -Non Sequitur