Some old fashioned assistance requested, and some oppinions wanted.

[Jim Stapleton]

OK, though my biggest concern was how they treated their customers in
hardware support.

As a benchmark, Toshiba is the first company that could actually give
me something as obscure as the PCMCIA controller chipset when I called
- and this was the first layer of tech support. The vendors I had delt
with previously couldn't even give me the video chipsets some times.
The only one that this wasn't tested on lied and voided my warantee...
I was so sick of them at that point, I couldn't bring up the energy to
fight it until it was way too late. As for Toshiba, they have pretty
much bent over backwards except where non-windows was concerned, and
even there they had made some pretty decent efforts. I really don't
want to loose that, but I also want to deal with my OS of choice.

Also, because of my vision, and now that I actually have the money to
afford a real laptop (and someone to buy my "old" one off me), it
would be ideal for me to get a tablet.

-Jim Stapleton

On 10/25/06, Kevin Oberman <oberman at es.net> wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 05:30:04 -0400
> > From: "Jim Stapleton" <stapleton.41 at gmail.com>
> > Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> >
> > addendum:
> >
> > How are the Lenovo notebooks, now that they are no longer associated
> > with IBM whatsoever?
>
> That is a very broad and probably invalid statement as IBM has a
> presence on the Lenovo board and ThinkPad development is still being
> done in the US (North Carolina) by pretty much the same group of
> engineers. Of course, there are likely some strategic changes from
> Lenovo in China that are impacting things.
>
> The T60 Core Duo systems look pretty good, although they all come with
> the dreaded 3945 wireless card. You can get am Athlon, but they are no
> longer "standard" upgrades. You get the system either without wireless or
> you replace the installed wireless card with the Atheros.
>
> HDA audio seems to be working, but I have done no serious testing since
> my laptop is an older T43 and the owner of the T60 does not use FreeBSD
> on it.
>
> The only REALLY new ThinkPad member is the Z series and I have no
> experience with them.
> --
> R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
> Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
> Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
> E-mail: oberman at es.net                  Phone: +1 510 486-8634
> Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751
>
>
>