On 11/5/05, D. Hugh Redelmeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > | From: Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > | Last year I read on > | this board that the BIOS will accept only a few hard drives > > Can you give a reference? My impression was that any hard drive of > the right physical size should work.
I haven't heard of a white-list for hard drives either. Only for the mini-PCI wireless card. I expect any hard drive should work just fine (again as long as it fits, seems to be normal laptop size). A hard drive is a hard drive. > | (or other > | peripherals for that matter; it will reject all micro-PCI wifi cards other > | than the hated Broadcom, to bring up another example). > > That is my understanding. I agree that this is quite annoying. > Mostly because there is no native LINUX driver for the Broadcom. The > excuse given (from my imperfect memory) is that the FCC approval was > for the notebook with that card and that the approval might not cover > the notebook with a different card. Not really sensible to me, but > regulators are not often sensible, so it might be true. The exact reason was that the certain cards are approved with the wireless antenna. It's a good excuse for HP to be able to sell more of their cards, but still they must abide be FCC regulations. I say a good excuse because there might be some way around it if they really wanted to, but I don't know. > Another one that annoys me right now is that the BIOS will not support > other CPUs. A 754-pin Turion ought to significantly reduce the power > draw but we cannot use one. > > http://www.overclockers.com/tips00781/ This certainly doesn't really seem unreasonable to me. This laptop was designed for the Athlon64 DTR chips. Why should HP/Compaq support the Turion64 chips when that is not their intent? It would be nice, but not something I would expect. > | Let me say this: Had I known of all these dirty tricks HP has been pulling > | off, I would have NEVER bought this laptop! > > I'm annoyed by a small set of stupidities: > > - BIOS stupidities listed above > > - I suspect that the BIOS ACPI is faulty, but I cannot prove it. > > - lack of public specs for > + Broadcom wireless chip > + flash memory reader > + nVidia graphics chips (no, a proprietary LINUX driver is not good > enough) Why not? At least nVidia graphics and drivers work. They support Linux even though they don't release source. It is my understanding that their hands are tied in relation to releasing sources due to non-disclosure agreements. But the driver works and gets good support, so why do people complain? It's much better than ATi, just ask anyone with an R4000. > This isn't worse than average for notebooks. On the other hand, Intel > does provide open source LINUX drivers for their wireless chips and > video chips. I found that LINUX supported more of a Dell Inspiron > 6000 than it supports on our notebooks. Yes, but Dell doesn't provide the option to have AMD CPUs in their laptops. Of course and AMD CPU would mean a non-Intel chipset anyway. I'm not a fan of Dell because of their Intel only policies. Also, they seem to have good prices until you upgrade the laptop enough to make it worth buying. My experience with HP/Compaq has been fairly good, or at least it was until my laptop up and died several weeks out of warranty (I do have an R3000z 60 GB hard drive that I might be willing to sell). Probably just one of those things, but maybe a heat issue. I really wish I could figure out what happened. But I won't buy a laptop with an ATi graphics card, but that seems to be all that there is. So that's why I've opted to get a new desktop, which I can build from parts myself without help from Dell, HP, or any other computer company. Now if only laptops were that way... Jonathan _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
