Advise for buying a Refurbished machine

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:59:43 +0000, dhaneshk k <dhaneshkk at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Fellow  BSDians,

> I need an advice from FreeBSD users.  I would like to buy a
> refurbished notebook from IBM.
>
> Model   IBM T60   > I heard  T60 series are excellent ?

I'm using FreeBSD/GNOME as my main environment on a Thinkpad X61s, and
my experience so far has been excellent.  The *only* bit of hardware
that doesn't attach to a working driver is the fingerprint reader, which
I don't really have a use for.

My loader.conf includes a few thinkpad-specific bits, like:

  # Intel wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN driver options.
  legal.intel_iwn.license_ack=1
  if_iwn_load="YES"

  # Autoloaded modules.
  acpi_ibm_load="YES"
  snd_hda_load="YES"

and I disable the internal Bluetooth support in sysctl.conf:

  # Disable the internal Bluetooth device of Thinkpad X61s by default.
  dev.acpi_ibm.0.bluetooth=0

but other than these pretty simple configuration options, everything
'Just Works(TM)' :)

One last thing that is worth mentioning:

It is not obvious from the webpage you pasted if the T60 you are going
to buy uses an Intel or ATI VGA chipset.  I generally opt for Intel VGA
chipsets, when I have a choice.  They tend to work slightly better on
the laptop's I've seen so far.

> I want to know
> 1) whether this notebook go well with FreeBSD-7.x versions ?  I want
> to use only FreeBSD on this notebook with X window system + Gnome
> Desktop,

This should work fine.

> 2) please advice me If I buy this machine is that a wise decision or
> refurbished machines are of high risk ?

This is something I cannot really answer.  I bought mine from a friend,
whom I trusted enough.  Depending on the source, there is an inherent
risk in buying 'used' parts, but it all boils down to how much you trust
the seller.