laptops?

[Brad De Vries]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 7:44 PM, Ken Moffat <kmoffat at drizzle.com> wrote:
> Anyone have opinions on decent laptops for home and small business?
>  Need reliability without breaking the bank, not too bleeding edge.
>
>  Thanks,
>  Ken

I've been quite happy with my new-to-me Dell Latitude D820, Intel
Core2 @ 1.66GHz, 2GB RAM, 100GB HD.  It's a lot faster than my old IBM
ThinkPad T20 with 256MB RAM!

It came with Windows XP Pro and everything seemed to work fine.  I
installed Kubuntu 8.04, which re-partitioned the HD into 2 50GB
partitions.

Things that either worked with Kubuntu out of the box or I was able to
get working:
1) Install had no issues.
2) WiFi worked with no issues.
3) Installed the open source NVIDIA drivers, which worked fine but did
not allow Compiz functionality.  I installed the NVIDIA closed-source
drivers, which worked fine, and was able to get Compiz working quite
nicely.
4) Sound worked with no issues.
5) CDRW/DVD installed with no issues but I have not tried to burn a CD yet.
6) Alps touch pad installed with no issues.

Things that do not work or I have not tried:
1) Internal modem, Conexant HDA D110 MDC V.92 Modem, was not detected
during install.
2) Internal NIC, Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gegabit controller, was
detected but I have not tried it.
3) All the USB ports appear to have been detected but I have not tried
any of them yet.
4) External VGA was detected, I think, but I haven't tried it yet.
5) RS-232 port was detected but I've not tried it.
6) IEEE 1394, firewire, was detected but I have not tried it.
7) PC Card port, detected but not tried.
8) Express Card port, don't even know what it is so I don't know if
it's been detected.

Even the battery seems to be working longer than I expected.  I can
easily get 2.5 - 3 hours.

HTH,
Brad.