Experience with Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop?

[John Birrell]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:52:43PM +1030, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> I'm thinking of buying a Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop.  I have a number
> of Dells, and on the whole I'm happy, but I've had "issues" before.
> Can anybody who has one of these machines (1150 only, please) tell me
> good or bad things about it?  Have you been able to get the internal
> wireless card to work?

I have an 1150 and it works great with RELENG_5 for me. I don't have the
version with the internal wireless though. I use the bfe (Broadcom BCM4401)
ethernet. No problems with that.

If you get one, go straight to Dell's support site and get the latest bios.
I had to do that before X would work. There have been a few bios updates and
my 1150 was shipped with an out-dated bios which I thought lacked attention
to detail by Dell when they build the machines to order in Malaysia.

I got a CD R/W and DVD R and that works fine. USB2.0 ports function well
as does sound. Whenever I watch videos, I choose to use the 1150 for that.

Obviously the winmodem doesn't work with FreeBSD. That's the only device
that isn't recognised during boot.

Once thing I really like about it is being able to set the bios to boot
via the ethernet port. That makes net-booting FreeBSD for driver development
a breeze.

I run RELENG_5 installed on the hard disk and net-boot to CURRENT. If I
remember correctly, it took me about 10 minutes to get XP off it and FreeBSD
on.

-- 
John Birrell