Processor
|
Pentium 4 2.4Ghz
|
Memory
|
512Mb
|
| Harddrive |
30Gb
|
Video card
|
ATI Radeon Mobilty 6, 32Mb
|
Monitor
|
15" LCD
|
CD
|
CD-RW/DVD combo
|
Built in
|
NIC, winmodem, Firewire, USB, floppy
|
Price
|
$1,100 + shipping (refurbished on ebay, May 2003)
|
See also Gateway's manual (
pdf,
local HTML version)
General Impressions
I like it. It looks good. The monitor is just the
right size. The touchpad is acceptable (I like trackballs better, but at
least it's not a nipple and you can't find a modern laptop with a trackball
anyways). There are very few idiotic "start calulcator" shortcut buttons
on the keyboard. Well, there are 4 of them, but they are not very visible
and they don't piss me off at all. The LCD is quite nice. I didn't
like it too much at first, but then I compared it to a high end Toshiba notebook
and saw no difference. I guess LCDs are not perfect yet. I watch
DVDs on it all the time and quality is ok. Speakers are a bit underpowered.
The biggest two problems are that it gets kind of hot and the fan is
not very quiet. The performance is pretty much where I expected it.
Windows XP
The laptop came with Windows XP Home. To my delight this appears to be a
normal XP install CD with minimal modifications by Gateway. After installing
from it I had to pop in another CD to get the right drivers installed. I
like this much more than image CDs and highly customized CD some vendors
will give you. There is not much else I can tell about XP. I gave it
13Gb partition because I know that Windows tends to grow at amazing speeds.
Visual Studio takes a lot of space and I might want to put a game or
two on it later. This was my first close experience with XP and it turned
out to be much nicer than I expected. After I turned off all the new
UI features of course.
FreeBSD (5.2-CURRENT)
I've been a
FreeBSD
user since 1997 (FreeBSD 2.2.2). I've never seen 5.x before, however,
since I only have one computer running FreeBSD and it's sort of mission-critical
and, hence, is running 4-STABLE. I tried installing 5.0-RELEASE and
install failed soon after beginning. A couple attempts later it was
clear that ACPI support is completely broken.
A couple of months later I tried new 5.1-CURRENT snapshot (as of Auguest 28th)
and it worked much better. The system became usable for web browsing, email
and minor working. However, under high CPU load (compile Mozilla or kernel)
the CPU overheats in approximately 10 minutes.
I've tried putting debug.acpi.disable="thermal" in /boot/loader.conf and it seems to work better like that: I can build kernel, but make buildworld still overheats it and needs to be done in two or three attempts.
I'm now using `acpiconf -d` to disable ACPI after booting, it seems to work better. Havn't tried building world or kernel yet.
Good news for a change: NIC, sound card and touchpad work.
more FreeBSD info (dmesg, XFree config etc)
Partition is 7Gb
BTW I switch between FreeBSD, XP and RedHat using the FreeBSD's boot manager. It can boot all three. Linux partition has Grub which can boot both RedHat and XP, but for some reason it fails to supply FreeBSD's loader with correct parition name. As the result FreeBSD can be booted from Grub but only with a manual intervention in the middle of the process.
GNU/Linux (RedHat 8.0)
Not much to say here. I installed RedHat 8.0 because RedHat is what we use at work and that's the only Linux distro I've ever used. Install was as easy as with FreeBSD and the new GUI installer is quite cute. It feels a little bit slower than under FreeBSD, but it must be prejudice. I din't have any of the FreeBSD ACPI crashing problems, but as far as I can tell it is just not making any use of ACPI features.
Some hardware details on Linux:
* sound works fine
* touch pad works
* cd burner works fine
* DVD player -- works, but I usually boot Windows for that
* winmodem theoretically should work, but I couldn't get it do anything useful
* suspend mode -- tried once, didn't (quite) work, havn't tried again
* 3D acceleration, Firewire, USB -- didn't try
*
update: I've installed kernel 2.6.9 on this RH8.0. It works fine. I might do a writeup later, for now if you need help getting 2.6 working on your laptop drop me a line.
If you need me to try something of the stuff I havn't tried, ask me and I'll
see if I can find some time for that.
more Linux info (dmesg, XFree config etc)
Partition is 8Gb
See also:
Steven Gould's page
slazar's tips: some details on overheating and ACPI, wireless LAN
Jesse's FreeBSD notes and log