Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 22:23:33 -0500 From: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net> To: "D. Michael McFarland" <dmmcf@uiuc.edu> Cc: freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Advice sought on Dell C600 Message-ID: <20010629222333.B69846@peorth.iteration.net>
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w In-Reply-To: <m3ofr7ut9l.fsf@katrine.aae.uiuc.edu>; from dmmcf@uiuc.edu on Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 11:48:22AM -0500 X-PGP-Fingerprint: 5025 F691 F943 8128 48A8 5025 77CE 29C5 8FA1 2E20 X-PGP-Key-ID: 0x8FA12E20 Since you are not very concerned about budget. I suggest the IBM X21/T21/T22 for what you want. Really, the Dell one is nice, but very bulky. I assume that you go to conventions often, and this one is way too bulky to carry for a long time. Your best bet is probably the T22 or T21 with a good sized display and high speed processor for matlab. (Trust me, I do the same things as you do.) Another good suggestion is the Sony R505 series. The IBM notebooks beat any of the machines mentioned in this email on battery life. (They beat Dell/Toshiba/Sony by hours.) Everything on the IBM laptops work well too. Lastly, I must ask that you try searching the archives next time. This question has been answered many times, and the consensus is always the same. On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 11:48:22AM -0500, D. Michael McFarland scribbled: | I seem to come back to every other day, after reconsidering my needs | and the latest gee-whiz machine any of my friends has acquired.) I'd | like to ask this group about the details, with the goal of taking the | machine out of the box and getting FreeBSD installed with a minimum of | fuss. I don't want to tarnish the image my colleagues have of free | Unix (or pull my hair out), and it's been some time since I really | knew the state of the art in hardware. I'll happily run STABLE, but I | don't want to have to run CURRENT. | | By way of background, I should state (admit?) that I do mostly | numerical work using some open-source tools plus Matlab and | Mathematica, spend most of my time in an editor, and make the | occasional presentation using TeX to generate PDF. So display size | and quality are important, but I don't need anything fancy. Sound is | a minor consideration, but it would be nice if I had some hope of | getting it working. | | Here are the specs of the machine I'm leaning toward, grouped more | PIII, 850 MHz, 14.1 inch XGA display | 256 MB SDRAM, 2 DIMMS | 10 GB HD | MS Win 98 (the cheapest alternative) | 24x CDROM | 8-cell Li-Ion battery | This comes to $1991.96 with the higher-education discount. | 256 MB RAM as 1 DIMM (+ $45) | 20 GB HD (+ $71) | CDRW (+ $230) | Conspicuously absent above are a NIC and/or modem. That's | because, of all I don't know about notebooks, I don't know the most | about those. I'll need 100BT ethernet and some reasonably standard | modem, but I don't know which if any of Dell's options are usable | under FreeBSD. Briefly, Dell offers what are described as | | Internal 3COM Mini-PCI NIC/Modem Combo (+ $70) | Xircom RealPort CardBus Ethernet 10/100 + Modem 56 (+ $203) -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | keichii@iteration.net | keichii@freebsd.org | | http://iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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