heard on the grapevine...

[Jules Gilbert]

A friend of mine was recently contacted by DELL.

They offered him a 45-day free trial of a dynamite laptop, based on 1920 
pixels on a side, and AMD 64-bit internals, running at 2.2Ghz.  A 
battery consisting of 12 cells, instead of the usual 8, which they claim 
will support four hours of use. 

Probably, it's a decent system.

For free.  For 45 days.

Apparently, DELL has changed their marketing habits.

I have a 32-bit Inspiron, model 1150, which doesn't play well with 
FreeBSD at all!  I can't use the built-in winModem, and it has some 
other issues, too.

My point:  I expect that we need to contact DELL and get them to make 
things a little easier for the FreeBSD community -- because I found my 
Inspiron so difficult to support that I had to go back to a split disk, 
with some portion lost to XP.  But if we were to help them along, I'll 
bet they would love to support us -- and sell even more laptops, too...

--jg

PS:  Once upon a time, Ford gave me a car they were about to annouce to 
test-drive.  For free.  On the condition that afterward I answer a few 
questions.  But this laptop trial is intended to sell their laptops.  A 
good idea.