| From: Jonathan Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Subject: Re: BIOS limitatinos [was Re: [LinuxR3000] Hard disk exploded]
Sorry for the spelling mistake. | On 11/5/05, D. Hugh Redelmeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | > | From: Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | 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. Note that there are at least two standard thicknesses for 2.5" drives. I don't know which ours uses. | 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. The excuse is a bit weaker for me since I'm not in the US. Secondly, the fact that I change the wireless card should not affect HP's compliance -- it would be my fault. | > 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. Agreed -- they never promised this. It still annoys me. One reason to buy parts to assemble a computer is that the motherboard makers often upgrade BIOSes to support new chips. Until (all too soon) some hardware reason leaves the board behind. | > I'm annoyed by a small set of stupidities: | > - lack of public specs for | > + 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. I keep computers for a long time (hey -- I still have an Altair 8800). Long after manufacturers get tired of supporting them. I have a significant number of PC bits that are no longer supported by their manufacturers. Open Source drivers still exist for a number of them. Example that annoys me at the moment: I've got a couple of amazing grey-scale monitors (more than 2k pixels across!) with dedicated PCI video cards. They have closed source drivers for OS/2, Win3.1, and Win95 (doesn't even work quite right with Win98). And no specs. I should throw them out, but it hurts. Example that annoys my wife: her fine old scanner has no WinXP drivers. Works fine in Linux. | Yes, but Dell doesn't provide the option to have AMD CPUs in their | laptops. Yes. It looks as if something immoral is going on, but it is hard to tell exactly what so the toothless anti-trust folks won't deal with it. Time for Eliot Spitzer? | 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. I'm almost AMD-only. I'm sending this mail from a K6 200MHz box. | Also, | they seem to have good prices until you upgrade the laptop enough to | make it worth buying. Sometimes Dell offers deals that I cannot resist. - Loss-leader Dimension 3000 - 2005FPW LCD monitor - nice Inspiron 6000 with 1920x1200 display They do make it really hard to find the good deals amongst the chaff. Pentium M is still the best CPU for notebooks (at a price). The Turions seem to be getting close. Intel and AMD seem to support Linux fairly well. But Intel makes interface chips too, so this support reaches farther. It looks to me as if most system and peripheral makers have to bow to invisible Microsoft pressure. The video chip makers are the obvious examples. So too are the laptop makers (try to buy a laptop without WindowsXP at a reasonable price point). | 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). That's sad! I've thought that the manufacturers' extended warranties might be worthwhile for notebooks -- many problems cannot be fixed by end users. The HP price seemed reasonable. HP would not sell me one because my machine is a US model and I live in Canada (not because it was refurbished). This took perhaps half a dozen phone calls to discover. Amusingly enough, some HP US notebook support is provided from "north of Seattle" (British Columbia). One event, or a few events, don't tell you the whole pattern. I have no data to rate HP vs Dell for reliability. I do know that my contact with HP support has been fairly bad (but not uniformly bad). This is not to do with broken hardware but to do with broken software and web pages and warranty policies. Mostly problems could be ascribed to (systematic) cluelessness, not evil. My minor contact with Dell has been more mixed but my problems have been different. My tentative conclusion is that these companies are OK at replacing broken hardware but cannot handle the complexity of bugs not previously solved (i.e. errors in design). This is assuming that you, the customer, are sophisticated enough. Of course the support systems are designed for unsophisticated customers. | 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... About a year ago, I bought a refurbished HP notebook and two refurbished HP desktops because the price for the raw hardware was amazingly low. Oh, and it was hardware that I valued. I knew that I was not going to have the control that I was used to with systems I assembled from bits. I was pleasantly surprised that the HP desktops (AMD 64) were quiet. Better than any machine I had since CPUs began requiring fans. One desktop's power supply stopped working. Easily diagnosed and fixed. Fixing a broken desktop is easier than fixing a notebook because the replaceable modules usually conform to industry standards. In the past, this was often not the case for brand-name desktops, but I think that they've gotten a lot better about this. All the hardware in my HP desktop is supported by Linux, even the flash memory reader. True, the ATI video card has only 2d support, but that's all I use (no better and no worse than the nVidia video chip in our notebook however it is an AGP card so I could replace it). Oops, I forgot -- the WinModem is probably unsupported, but I haven't looked. Oh, and BIOS and DVD writer firmware flashing requires Windows. _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
