Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:52:21 -0500 From: "Boris Karloff" <modelt20@canada.com> To: "Jeff D. Hamann" <jeff.hamann@forestinformatics.com>, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: laptop question... Message-ID: <432dc575.2f0.1b2.234@canada.com>
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I'm Curious, Why did you select this laptop over other, more common brands (HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc)? Prices are similar. http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=32 My vote is to abandon Windows XP, and, for that matter, MS office. OpenOffice is really becoming a formidable contender, and its price is right. Depending on which VBA you mean (is this the Visual Basic purchased separately, or the Visual Basic for Applications that came packaged with Office, a different animal), there are interpreters for Basic available for *nix environments; but more powerful programming languages are more common. People often originally learned Basic as a simple way to get a specific task done, but MS has lost this concept, rolling their programming language into an all-encompassing beast of a package they call .NET. Now, to get even a simple computational result, you have to perform all this overhead. *nix has many compilers that remain simple to use. MS really shot themselves in the foot with that one, didn't they? If you feel you must be on the bleeding edge, then be sure to avoid Windows XP home. It doesn't have a full complement of networking components. You may not need it today, but someday you might. The hardware you spec'd should run freeBSD fine. Check on an option to purchase the computer without an OS, sometimes this is cheaper. Be wary of win-modems (soft modems) and more recently, win-printers (soft printers). These depend on part of the firmware being available in the OS, which means they only work with recent versions of Windows. Many Win-modems have been ported to Linux, notably the ones based on the Lucent chipset. Win-printers haven't been so fortunate. You can usually recognize these from the specs, since they don't list support for PCL, postscript, or other printer language in their specs. These are not wise purchases. Harold. I'm about to purchase a sager np3880 laptop: http://www.discountlaptops.com/index.php?section=specs&model_id=1176&category... and want to know if there might be any problems with the hardware especially the usb and video. Has anyone been able to get wuxga (1900x1200 screen sizes) while running freebsd? I'm in the middle of purchasing new machines and I'm struggling with the concept of running wine so I can run MS Windows apps (ms office access+vba) or should I not bother with freebsd (5.4/6.0) and stick with xp? The video data is PCI Express x16 3D Accelerator 128MB DDR2 PCI-e nVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 Video Memory and what is the experience with power management. I've seen lots of complaints about laptops going to sleep and never waking up... Jeff. -- Jeff D. Hamann Forest Informatics, Inc. PO Box 1421 Corvallis, Oregon 97339-1421 phone 541-754-1428 fax 541-752-0288 jeff.hamann@forestinformatics.com http://www.forestinformatics.com _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" ---------------------------------------- Upgrade your account today for increased storage; mail forwarding or POP enabled e-mail with automatic virus scanning. Visit http://www.canada.com/email/premiumservices.html for more information.
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