Best $1000 Freebsd laptop?

[Zane C. B-H.]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2011 08:20:47 -0500
Xn Nooby <xnooby at gmail.com> wrote:

> I bought a laptop that has an unsupported video card, so now it is
> my "windows laptop".  I am thinking of getting another to be my
> "freebsd laptop", so I want to make sure it really works with
> FreebSD.  I could probably spend <$1000 (USD) on one.  I like the
> look of the Lenovos but I am unfamiliar with all the different
> models, and have never bought anything from their webstore.  I
> normally buy from Dell or Amazon, and I never buy used or
> refurbished (unless its a car!).
> 
> My main requirements are having long battery life, opengl graphics,
> vtx suppoort (virtualization).  A decent drive (500+GB) and ram
> (6GB+) would be nice.  I can't believe ZFS needs 6GB+ ram, and I am
> not sure I would want to get a lot of ram, just so I could use
> ZFS.  On the other hand, I read that UFS is getting old.  I would
> rather use RAM for running virtual machines.
> 
> I'm scared to death of getting another machine that has an
> unsupported video card (like nvidia optimus), or no VTX.  I want a
> long lasting machine that I can travel with, take to work, and not
> be limited by. My windows laptop is an i3 with VTX, and is a little
> under-powered, so I am thinking of an i5+.  I don't do a lot of
> number-crunching, but I don't want it to be slow, either.

On all the laptops where I've cared about graphics performance, I went
with one with a nVidia chipset. Unless I am mistaken, that is the
only real option currently for with X on FreeBSD, when it comes to
having good OpenGL performance.

In regards to UFS2, works perfectly fine for a laptop. In fact in
general unless you really need expandable storage, there is little
reason to use ZFS or any similar FS.