New or used laptop recommendation(s)

[Shane J Pearson]

Hello Eric,

On 2006.06.09, at 11:28 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams at a VSAT somewhere  
wrote:

> I've gone through a couple of Sony's, don't want to repeat that,  
> and I'm
> looking for suggestions.

I am also not very pleased with my Sony VAIO. I had been trying to  
get the 6 Rel series going on my VGN-A49GP and now thanks to the  
FreeBSD people I can run 6.1 on this machine. But now that I can  
finally run 6.1 Rel, after 11 months of owning and having the machine  
almost always on my desk (rarely moved), this $5,000 AU machine is dead.

I am *really* glad that I paid the extra $250 for an extra 2 years on  
the warrantee. But with the poor physical quality starting to show  
through and the fact that it's now dead, I'm wondering if I should  
sell it after getting it back from Sony repairs and cut my losses and  
get a Thinkpad. Opening and closing it feels so very painfully  
plastic and like something is going to break, the silver paint on the  
palm rests even started wearing off after only 2 months or so. The  
BIOS options are about as minimal as you can get and some BIOS  
functions don't even work (has option to boot external device, but  
will not boot any USB or firewire device, not even a Sony USB floppy  
drive).

This was my first Sony laptop and will almost certainly be my last. I  
would not recommend a Sony VAIO to my worst enemy.

My girlfriend has a really nice IBM/Lenovo Z60t Thinkpad which I have  
put a minimal 6.1 Rel install (CLI only) into a very small partition  
for scripted whole-disk image backups for her. Can anyone report if  
sound is supported yet on the Z60t under FreeBSD? I'm so impressed  
with the build quality of this Thinkpad, that I'm kicking myself for  
not going with what I knew were good quality machines.


Shane