Laptop recommendations?

[Ian Smith]

On Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:17:08 +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
 > El día Saturday, June 25, 2011 a las 11:25:02AM -0700, David Wolfskill escribió:
 > 
 > > On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 07:34:24PM +0200, Bastian Rieck wrote:
 > > > Dear list,
 > > > 
 > > > I need to replace my old IBM Thinkpad R50e, which is running FreeBSD
 > > > 8.2. Currently, my favoured replacement is a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E520.
 > > > ....
 > > 
 > > I rather like the laptop I've been using for the past several months: a
 > > Dell Precision M4400.  I track stable/8 & head (in different slices) on
 > > it daily; it normally takes about an hour to take care of both of those.
 > 
 > I run a bunch of laptops/netbooks, all with some older 8-CURRENT or now
 > 9-CURRENT (head):
 > 
 > Acer Aspire One D250
 > Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M1437G
 > Asus EeePC 900
 > Dell M4400

How well does suspend/resume work on these?  An absolute must for me.

My Thinkpad T23s always resumed 100% reliably through 6.x and 7.x, still 
does at 7.4-R, but since 8.0-R through to 8.2-R they completely freeze
for an even 60 seconds on resume, after which I often get a bunch of 
'time went backwards' errors - sometimes on every process running - so 
I've never felt able to really trust it after resuming.  Noone seems to 
know about that issue; probably no developers have i386 laptops anymore.

 > Ofc, every laptop has its own problem, for example with sound, and needs
 > special attention (read: finding a solution);
 > 
 > concerning graphic, it's not an FreeBSD issue, but havin support in Xorg
 > for the chipset;
 > 
 > the best way, if youd dealer allows it, would be to boot the laptop in
 > question with a recent Knoppix DVD to see in detail what is in the box
 > and then check the FreeBSD man(4) pages if it is supported;

The PC-BSD 8.2 memstick might be a good option for that sort of testing.  
Unlike the FreeBSD memsticks it's a full DVD-sized image on a proper MBR
slice, so you can write eg a verbose dmesg.boot and sysctl -a to another 
slice for later evaluation on an 8GB+ stick, from the fixit boot.

Guess I should try booting it on my daughter's EeePC, 1050 as I recall.

 > > And it has a 1920x1200 display -- as well as 2 sets of 3 mouse buttons
 > > each (each of which works as expected).
 > > 
 > > I have found that I sometimes manage to slide the "WiFi disable" switch
 > > to an unwanted setting accidentally, and the power connection slips out
 > > a little too easily, but those are about the worst things I can think of
 > > with respect to the hardware.
 > 
 > I have the same problem with the M4400 :-) it's just a bad hardware/case
 > design;

I suppose that's not a problem as long as it then behaves ok on battery. 
I've never much fancied Dells but with the demise of 'proper' IBM/Lenovo 
laptops, I'm trying to keep an open mind to others.  How's that Fujitsu?

cheers, Ian