New or used laptop recommendation(s)

[Eric Anderson]

Shane J Pearson wrote:
> 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.

Did you try the recent patch sent to this very list?

Eric


-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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