On 2001-08-14 Jaime Bemaras <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello list,
Hello Jaime, > I am looking to acquire a laptop. I will need a dual boot system > because my university only supports MS software (don't get me > started). I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 8000, and for now I am very happy with it. > Here's my whishlist: > > - AMD processor preferred. Hum... I don't think Dell ships its laptops with AMD processors. Only Intel I fear. BTW the motherboard is an Intel i815. > - Touchpad preferred (I hate eraser-style mice) The i8000 has both of them! This also means two sets of buttons, which is quite handy. > - Active Matrix with 1024x768 or better resolution Active Matrix 15" SXGA+ (ie. 1400x1050). Sharp display, very comfortable. The display can be stretched to fit the whole screen; quite awful for 1280x1024 (very sad aliasing), but fine for 1024x768. > - Room for a lot of RAM Up to 512 Mb I believe. > - DVD (DVD/CD-RW combo?) (even if swappable) The i8000 is equipped with an "optical bay" for which you can choose at buy-time almost any combination of cd-rom, cd-rw and dvd. It also has a "media bay"; by default it holds a removable floppy drive that you can replace with whatever you like (battery, HDD, DVD...). > - A big HD Mine is 20 Gb. At the time I bought my laptop there were also 32 Gb HDDs available. IIRC even 48 Gb is possible. > - Obviously, Debian supported hw (sound, modem, etc.) My i8000 has a NVidia GeForce2 Go video card, which is unfortunately not supported in xfree 3.3.6 (had to use framebuffer, quite slow). I recently upgraded to xfree 4.0.3 (from unstable), and everything works fine with the proprietary driver from NVidia. There is nevertheless a bug in the current driver: killing then restarting X hangs the laptop. The modem is a winmodem (ActionTec), compatible with the semi open-source ltmodem driver. The modem is coupled with an eepro100 compatible network card. Sound works perfectly (maestro3 module). Other hardware includes 2 USB ports and PCMCIA slots that I have not tried to configure (no use for now). Hope this helps, Andréas -- Andréas Saudemont <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
