Best laptop for Freebsd

Nathan Vidican nvidican at wmptl.com
Thu Nov 16 06:51:20 PST 2006


Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, gb wrote:
>
>> Thanks Guys,
>>
>> I think that I might go with the Toshiba as unfortunately the 
>> Thinkpad seem a bit pricey (I can't stay of the booze any longer :)
>
> I am not sure Toshiba is so good any more. Maybe just a coincidence 
> but we use three Ts in our organization. Two have already broken (one 
> mainboard, the other graphic card), the third one works but issues 
> sudden, irregular beeps which Toshiba has been _unable_ to diagnose 
> for 6 months now! They tell us that since it works, then it is nothing 
> serious. I get rather mad when I hear that only because we didn't get 
> a second-hand unit but a brand new one and I would expect it to shut 
> up and work since it is new and T. We're a bit discouraged at the 
> moment with Toshiba.
>
>

I work for several companies, managing their it assets, dealing with 
purchasing, configuration, and maintenance - collectively purchasing a 
few hundred laptops over the passed few years. I've been a FreeBSD since 
the 2.2.1-RELEASE days, and have always had FreeBSD on my personal 
laptop - which changes once a year to a new model, (sparing the IBM 
stinkpads as mentioned below which were completely incapable of booting 
*BSD due to IBM's lack of judgement/research).

Same here - many issues with Toshiba laptops in the lest year or two. 
Stopped even thinking about the IBM Thinkpads - we call them stinkpads; 
had so many issues running BSD on them, in particular the M-series a few 
years back had bios issues as IBM chose *BSD's partition type (165) for 
their hybernation partition; poor excuses and even poorer support from 
IBM led us to cease purchasing their products and to seek elsewhere. 
IBM's official position on the issue, (after months of nagging them), 
was 'we only support windows 2000 on that particular model'. Don't get 
me wrong, IBM makes really good laptops - they take top-notch 
components, piece them all together well - package them up nicely, but 
then they totally screw up the bios and configuration so-as to be 
windows-centric.

In the end, we moved to Compaq (just before the merger with HP), and 
have since never been happier. Using mostly the Compaq Presario and HP 
Pavillion lines now (geared towards home users) we find nothing beats 
them in terms of price/featureset. I'm writing this now from an HP 
Pavillion dv8000-series laptop, (AMD Turion 64 processor,1024mb ram, has 
two hard drives (80gb stock, added 7200rpm 80gb afterwards), 17" 
widescreen display, ATI graphics/chipset, wireless, dvd-rw, etc...). It 
dual boots between FreeBSD and Windows Vista 64-bit (for some 
development stuff), never had a problem with it - works great all-around 
and came stock with everything I could want for under $1300 Canadian 
dollars. I have yet to see IBM, Toshiba, or even Dell come close to that 
offering.

Just my two cents - but for what it's worth, I've got the experience and 
numbers to back it up - only had a single unit sent back for repair in 
the last year, and even then was returned fixed as promised in two days.


--
Nathan Vidican
nvidican at wmptl.com


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