[CLUE-Talk] DaVinci Technologies?

[Nate Duehr]

Jed S. Baer wrote:

> On Wed, 12 May 2004 17:17:57 -0600
> "Jed S. Baer" <thag at frii.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Well, I haven't shopped much for used laptops, but from what I've seen
>>of the prices, you're better off watching the Sunday newspaper ads from
>>the big-box stores, and waiting for a bargain price on a new one. The
>>price/performance ratio I've seen on cheap used laptops was really
>>outrageous (very pricey for what you got).
> 
> 
> Just out of curiosity, I checked the compusa website. Here's 2 items:
> 
> Used Vaio: Intel Pentium III Processor, 800MHz, 128MB RAM, 15GB Hard
> Drive, 14.1-inch XGA TFT LCD Display, CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive -- $949
> 
> New Toshiba Satellite: Intel Celeron Processor, 2.8GHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB
> Hard Drive, 15-inch XGA TFT Display, 8X DVD / 24X10X24 CD-RW Combo Drive
> -- $999

I started to type up a long-winded e-mail about some laptops I've been 
looking at also, and then figured that it would just seem like a 
tangent... but... I guess I'll throw in $0.02 worth anyway.

Take a look at the eMachines laptops.  Best Buy (hmm, there they are 
again) has the Celeron 2.8 GHz one with a 15.4" widescreen and a combo 
DVD reader/CD-RW drive and a 40G hard disk with 256 MB of RAM for about 
$850 after two mail in rebates of $100 and $150.

There are four models... the next one up gains you 20G more hard disk 
space, and 512 MB of RAM for another $100.

The top of the line (M6809) machine is a true Mobile Athlon 64 3200 chip 
with an ATI Radeon 9600 video card, 80G hard disk (only 4200 RPM), 512 
MB of RAM, a DVD+-/RW drive, built in 802.11g, and the 15.4" widescreen 
LCD again for just over $1200 with rebates.  Quite the little "desktop 
replacement" machine, fully-capable of playing quite a few of the really 
tough games, etc.

They have a few trade-offs and achilles heels -- one is, the software 
bundle stinks that they come with.  The next, poor battery life, 
especially on the fast ones with the big processors.  And finally, 
whoever makes the 15.4 widescreen LCD's for them has some manufacturing 
problems -- specifically ONE pixel somewhere on the screen "sticks" and 
won't change color at all.  People return them to the stores when they 
see this problem, and some of the less scrupulous stores seem to be 
putting them back on the shelves hoping the next guy won't notice.  Look 
carefully for this if you get one.  A friend of mine went through three 
of them from Best Buy before finding one that didn't have the stuck 
pixel problem somewhere on the screen.  Once he hit that third 
magical-charmed one... he's been super happy with the machine ever since.

They also have a number of "unknowns" for Linux... I haven't seen too 
many reports of ALL hardware working well on Linux... the Broadcom 
chipsets for the built-in Ethernet and Wireless tend to require that you 
use the Windows drivers through a wrapper from most of the information 
I've found on the web, and the oddball screen resolution because of the 
widescreen can be a little bit of work to get set up correctly in X, 
along with the usual pain of dealing with ATI cards.  XFree 4.4 
supposedly has better support for this chipset than 4.3 does, but most 
distros are leaning toward staying on 4.3 after the recent fork of the X 
project.

I'm considering getting one of the Athlon-64 machines -- they don't 
smoke the competition on speed in these laptops, but comparable specs on 
hardware would run well over $2000 from Dell (just as one example) who 
also does not offer built in DVD writers yet (only externals).   Only a 
very few companies have any of the 64-bit processors in their laptop 
lines yet, so that's kinda "fun" too, just for the geek value of being 
able to play with the kernels for them.

Still debating on whether I'll buy one... and deciding if I really want 
to spend money on a laptop... the last time I bought my own laptop and 
wasn't using a work-issued one was on a Toshiba Portege 3010/3015 when 
it was new, and the Pentium I 233 in it was still considered "pretty 
fast"... heh... and that was many many years ago... it's still running, 
but missing two keys from the keyboard... I like stuff that lasts! 
read: I'm a cheapskate!  But that also means I'm willing to pay with my 
time in figuring out oddball machine chipset issues and tinker a bit 
with it in Linux to save a few hundred bucks.  Heh.

If I do get one, I'll post information about it either on my website at 
www.natetech.com or better, turn it in to the folks at 
www.linux-laptop.net -- that site ROCKS... I've used it soooo many times 
for various work laptops to find hints and tricks of various machines... 
and there's no eMachines M6805 or M6809 installation docs up there 
yet... an opportunity to give back to the community.

Good luck on finding what you're looking for -- hope this doesn't make 
the decision harder.

(By the way, the IBM G-series and R-series, like the R20 are fairly 
inexpensive right now for what you get, but their disk space numbers and 
speeds, etc... don't hold a candle to the machines above... but they're 
reliable... really reliable.  The last company I worked for issued me an 
IBM R-series laptop (R31), and it was really a good solid machine for a 
laptop.  They're better documented for use with Linux and rugged as 
hell... heavy too!  GRIN...)

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com