ACPI problems with Dell laptops (was: Laptop choices)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 22 November 2005 at 17:12:46 -0800, Graham North wrote:
> Am currently trying to choose between a couple of laptops, the luck
> winner of which will have Freebsd loaded alongside WinXP.
>
> Dell Latitude d600 with Radeon 9000? video, intel pro wireless
> or
> IBM R51 - Intel Extreme2, intel pro wireless.
> The main differences will likely be the video and maybe bios, acpi...?
> Can someone suggest to me whether these are both safe choices?
> Am I better off installing 5.4 or 6.0?

I've had both Dell and ThinkPad (no longer IBM).  I prefer Dell,
despite their attempts to convince me otherwise.

However, we currently seem to have significant ACPI problems with Dell
laptops.  I'm writing this on an Inspiron 6000 running 7-CURRENT, but
the same problems occur with 6.0: if I enable ACPI, timing goes to
hell, and some things just time out.  There was a similar message a
couple of days ago from an owner of (I think) the latest Latitude
machine, which sounded even worse.  My requests for feedback about how
to solve the problem have so far not been resolved.  If you're
otherwise tending towards Dell, I'd suggest you watch this space until
there's some indication that the problems will be resolved.

Nothing of this says that ThinkPads will do better, of course.  I
don't know what the situation is there.

Greg
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