laptop question...

Boris Karloff modelt20 at canada.com
Sun Sep 18 12:52:37 PDT 2005


I'm Curious,

Why did you select this laptop over other, more common
brands (HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc)? Prices are similar.

http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=32

My vote is to abandon Windows XP, and, for that matter, MS
office. OpenOffice is really becoming a formidable
contender, and its price is right. Depending on which VBA
you mean (is this the Visual Basic purchased separately, or
the Visual Basic for Applications that came packaged with
Office, a different animal), there are interpreters for
Basic available for *nix environments; but more powerful
programming languages are more common. People often
originally learned Basic as a simple way to get a specific
task done, but MS has lost this concept, rolling their
programming language into an all-encompassing beast of a
package they call .NET. Now, to get even a simple
computational result, you have to perform all this overhead.
*nix has many compilers that remain simple to use. MS really
shot themselves in the foot with that one, didn't they?

If you feel you must be on the bleeding edge, then be sure
to avoid Windows XP home. It doesn't have a full complement
of networking components. You may not need it today, but
someday you might. 

The hardware you spec'd should run freeBSD fine. Check on an
option to purchase the computer without an OS, sometimes
this is cheaper. Be wary of win-modems (soft modems) and
more recently, win-printers (soft printers). These depend on
part of the firmware being available in the OS, which means
they only work with recent versions of Windows. Many
Win-modems have been ported to Linux, notably the ones based
on the Lucent chipset. Win-printers haven't been so
fortunate. You can usually recognize these from the specs,
since they don't list support for PCL, postscript, or other
printer language in their specs. These are not wise
purchases. 

Harold.


I'm about to purchase a sager np3880 laptop:

http://www.discountlaptops.com/index.php?section=specs&model_id=1176&category...

and want to know if there might be any problems with the
hardware
especially the usb and video. Has anyone been able to get
wuxga (1900x1200
screen sizes) while running freebsd? I'm in the middle of
purchasing new
machines and I'm struggling with the concept of running wine
so I can run
MS Windows apps (ms office access+vba) or should I not
bother with freebsd
(5.4/6.0) and stick with xp?

The video data is

PCI Express x16 3D Accelerator
128MB DDR2 PCI-e nVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 Video Memory

and what is the experience with power management. I've seen
lots of
complaints about laptops going to sleep and never waking
up...

Jeff.



-- 
Jeff D. Hamann
Forest Informatics, Inc.
PO Box 1421
Corvallis, Oregon 97339-1421
phone 541-754-1428
fax 541-752-0288
jeff.hamann at forestinformatics.com
http://www.forestinformatics.com

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