On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 05:38:56PM -0800, Heather wrote: > * video chipset that is -actually- supported by X 4. I'm strongly > interested in moving that direction, but since my current systems > work, I'm not terribly interested in half measures or putting up > with bleeding-edge vendor bull. Wish me luck. I think this is > my pickiest feature request. Hmm, my Dell Inspiron 5000e has ATI Rage Mobility M3 16 MB (r128). Works rather well in XF4 (@1400x1050), although I get some weird "desynched" "burning" LCD screens when switching back to text mode in certain modes. And if using frame buffer on bootup, then the same weird thing happens.
> * it has to have decent onboard disk space. Or tell me the mm height > required and if the machine is openable enough, I can fix that little > problem on my own. I had originally not thought much of this as > firewire/usb extra storage is now easy to get and anyways, I have > a PCMCIA/IDE controller bay. But the fact is I do not usually carry > this sort of peripheral except by appointment. So I'd rather 10Gb > than 6, and more would increase my ability to treat it as my primary > system. 20 Gb would probably be plenty. > btw: best 9 mm drives, anyone? criteria - well behaved, then > capacity, then price. I might just buy one of these > and not bother with a new laptop yet. My 20GB Fujitsu drive just failed on me after only 7 weeks. Dell promptly sent me a replacement IBM drive (DJSA-220). So far very good (after two weeks), but IBM drives are said to be rather "clunky", and it seems Dell has *frequent* problems (read: failure due to excess clunking (read: platter damage) or high-pitched noise) with big HDDs on its notebooks (many brands, but also IBM). Somebody said Toshiba drives were more quiet in general, but I don't know much about this. Some people had their third HDD shipped from Dell already... I had my previous HDD spin down rather frequently (every 20 minutes), so you might want to avoid that (although I suspected disk failure for that Fujitsu drive from the *beginning* due to weird changes in noise). Actually I don't let the IBM spin down any more at all. In short: bigger drives seem to be VERY fragile !!! But OTOH the 6.4 GB IBM in my very old Acer notebook already grew much louder, too :-\ > Comments other than "star, you type too much" welcome. /me typed too much ;) Andreas Mohr
