laptops?

[Bruce Marshall]

On Thursday 01 May 2008, Ken Moffat wrote:
> Thinking of Toshiba or Lenovo, but open to others.

Just bought a Toshiba U405-2830    3GB ram   250gb HD.

Came with Vista which I used for a day.   Yuck.

I had already bought a copy of XP that I planned to put on it so I tried to 
install that.   At first it wouldn't even see the HD's because they were in a 
new mode  AHCI?  that XP could use.   Set the HD to compatibility and then XP 
installed.

Tried to load some drivers for the Intel chipset and had all kinds of 
problems.  (this is all under XP)   Long and the short story is that I can't 
get the wifi to work under XP but the LAN works after finding a driver for 
it.   (Marvell Yukon LAN chip....  which many laptops seems to be using these 
days)

Linux had a bit easier time.  It saw the HD's in AHCI mode....  and I 
installed Kubuntu 8.04.   This time the wifi worked without much fussing but 
the LAN doesn't work.  (just the opposite)

I've looked all over for some code for the Marvell Yukon but everyone seems to 
be having problems with it.  I finally sent a note to the Marvell people and 
they are being very responsive.  Sent me a beta version of their driver but 
it is having compile problems with the latest kernel.  I expect to get the 
LAN working next week when they fix some things.

Other than that, it seems to be a very nice machine but small, which is what I 
wanted.  The touchpad is very sensitive and gets kind of irritating when it 
does things when you don't think you touched it.  I haven't looked into 
desense'ing it but I am sure it can be done.  There is code under XP to dumb 
it down a bit.  It also comes with a DVD-RW which is nice.