Well, I have bought a new laptop now. One of these in fact... Fujitsu Lifebook AH531 Laptop http://www.ebuyer.com/285962-fujitsu-lifebook-a530-laptop-vfy- a5300mrsa1gb
(though mine is an Ex-display model, so ignore the price...) I'm pleased to report that it's a rather nice machine. Well packaged with a very nice monitor and good keyboard. The touchpad lacks a scroll facility, but otherwise it's very nice. As you might expect, it comes with more software than you really need, so I have spent most of the evening trimming the surplus windows software and getting Linux (Debian Squeeze) installed (which it now is). Two points of note on this; Firstly I was pleasantly surprised to see a disk-partitioning wizard as part of the windows setup, so reducing the windows system disk was easy. Secondly, I was less pleased to find out that the wired nic is by realtek and required a non-free bit of firmware which wasn't on the debian install cd. It is, however in the non-free repository, so you need to do a bit of package work to find it, and some old-school fiddling to install it. Once this was done, installation was reasonably smooth. I am yet to check out all the features under Linux, but I don't expect too many problems. I will post benchmark results tomorrow for anyone who's interested. Cheers, Tim B. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
