David A. Harding
Monday, 21 Mar 2005
Yesterday my new (refurbished) laptop arrived. The ebay page is here: http://tinyurl.com/5hzfg What I got for $945USD
I settled on this laptop for a few specific reasons: it had the hardware I wanted (DVD, USB2, IrDA, Radeon), the Pentium-M has very good power management and from what I read Dell Latitudes are known to have long lifetimes.
On all of those concerns I'm very happy. I played a DVD last night, which was as beautiful as the last laptop. Video-out works like a charm, just as the old Radeon did. The power management is exceptional: I get about 3.5 hours on a full battery for casual emailing/vi'ing/etc... and a bit over 5.5 hours with the lid shut. Suspend works perfectly.
When purchasing the laptop I was aware that the built-in wireless wouldn't work with (completely) free software. I did fail to realize how agonizing this would be. The part that particullarly pisses me off is that I don't know what to do about it. Write a letter to Intel? No, it's a software-defined radio, they'd break a FCC regulation if they made it easy to hack. Write a letter to the FCC—ha! I have to think about this.
The good news is that the laptop already feels like $HOME. I'm going to tweak some more and then write a another doc for linux-on-laptops.com.