laptops

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi
     Well I'll try to give as much info as I can. I've got a toshiba satellite pro 4340 laptop computer. It's a good system as far as hardware and performance goes. Intel pentium III 650MHz processor with 64mb ram. It has a 12GB hard disk. All hardware, even the winmodem, is linux compatible. It has a built-in floppy and DVD-rom disk. The sound system works fine with the ALSA drivers, it's a yamaha YMF744 chip. It's multi-channel, too. There are two type II pcmcia card slots. It has a serial port, a parellel port, an IRDA port, and a USB port. I've got slackware linux running on it right now. The modem, a lucent LT winmodem, works well with kernels 2.2 and 2.4 with the lucent driver. In full power mode it gives about 3 hours continuous battery life. However, there's no reason to unload their windows that comes with this machine. It's win 98SE and all the drivers are prop[erly set up for you. You just need to get rid of the desktop wallpaper and theme and any windows screen reading program will work fine. I just used fips to split the windows partition and installed linux on the rest of the drive. Speakup on this system works well! The num-pad, as in most laptops, is used by depressing the FN key and then the keys on the right side of the keyboard. Even the insert-key combinations are no problem really, but you need to be a bit dextrous to handle some of them. The only complaint I have about this laptop is that there's only one control key on the left side of the keyboard. It would have been nice to have another control key on the right side, but oh well.


On Mon, Feb 19, 2001 at 04:21:57PM -0500, Brian Moore wrote:
> Greetings all.  Okay, finally am breaking down and hunting for a laptop
> computer .  I want to use this machine to boot both linux and windows.  I
> suspect windows will have no real problems since I will probably get a
> machine with it loaded whether or not I want their windows.  However, I have
> had bad experiences with other machines in the past which required lots of
> drivers and would only work with the OF.a.m version of windows from that
> particular laptop company.  would like to avoid this if at all possible
> since I will probably nuke the disk as the first thing and put a standard
> version of win98 se and create a Linux partition running slackware or redhat
> or something like that.  would like as little strange hardware as possible.
> I really like like the keyboards on the thinkpad computers but they are
> pretty costly and i.b.m sometimes has strange hardware configurations at
> least on the desktop machines I have worked with.  Would be most interested
> in people's experience with notebook computers.  I don't mind spending a
> little more money for a good machine but really want to avoid proprietary
> software and sound video chips etc.  any thoughts viaprivate mail would be
> much appreciated.
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