Rough Book

My new laptop

I recently bought myself a new laptop – the Dell XPS M1530. I was originally considering a Macbook, but that was a little too pricey for me. I started to fancy OS X ever since I found out that it is basically FreeBSD at the core. Also, there is the eye-candy. Other than the price-tag, I also realized that the only reason I would want the Macbook was because it looks so good. That didn’t seem entirely practical. I could still get the eye-candy and the productivity on another OS. The last laptop I bought was an Alienware beast. It was ridiculously heavy and I got sick of lugging it around. It basically a desktop masquerading as a laptop. In addition to being really heavy, it generates quite a lot of heat. Enough to burn your lap. But it plays games really, really well. Anyway, I decided that I would look for a nice non-Apple laptop. After scouring the Internets and reading a bunch of reviews, I settled on the XPS. It’s sleek, stylish, fast, portable, and it got a bunch of good reviews. I went to the Dell site and configured my XPS:

• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7700 (2.4GHz/800Mhz FSB, 4MB Cache)
• 3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (2 Dimms)
• 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
• 250GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
• High Resolution glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD(1680×1050) 2MP Camera
• Slot Load DVD+/-RW (DVD/CD read/write)
• Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy HD Software Edition
• Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N Mini-card (4965AGN)

It’s got some punch. I’m mainly going to use it as a development machine so the RAM and speed definitely help as far as compile-times go. They estimated about two weeks to build the laptop, but actually I got a pleasant surprise when the laptop arrived a little over a week after I ordered it. I wasn’t disappointed in the least when I opened up the package. The first thing I did was blast Vista off the hard-drive and install PC-BSD. This is where I learnt a hard lesson. Stability in the BSD world comes at a price. You don’t have very good hardware support (for no fault of FreeBSD; I’ll rant about this later) for the latest hardware. Drivers are not included until they are reliable and stable. As a result, my Marvell Yukon 88E8040 Gigabit Ethernet card, and my Intel 4965AGN Wireless-N card were unrecognized. Marvell (surprisingly) had a FreeBSD 6 driver on their website that is supposed to work with the 88E80XX series, but I was unable to get it to work on my system. I tried using ndiswrapper to get the Intel card working, but I only succeeded in crashing my system very nicely. I was pretty bummed. I really didn’t want to go back to using The Evil (Vista), and so I decided to play around with kubuntu for a while. It was nice, and I may get back to it. But for the hell of it, I wiped it off and tried to install OS X on it. I was able to get a “patched” Leopard ISO and I actually got it to install on the XPS. However, I wasn’t able to get it to recognize any of my network devices. So after playing around with that for a while, I went back to The Evil. I am hoping that by the time PC-BSD 2.0 or FreeBSD 7.0 rolls around, there will be more support for the network cards. If that’s the case, I’ll definitely be wiping out Vista and installing PC-BSD (or install FreeBSD 7.0 and build KDE). I’ve been using Vista for a little while, and I guess it’s not so bad. It’ll stay out of your way if you ask it to. But it really doesn’t compare to either PC-BSD, Kubuntu, or Leopard. As far as the XPS, I like it a whole lot. I think Dell has done a pretty good job with it.

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February 17, 2008 Posted by vivin | Computers, FreeBSD, Hardware, Linux, Networking, Operating Systems, Windows | dell, freebsd, kubuntu, laptop, leopard, mac, os x, pcbsd, windows vista, xps, xps m1530 | 12 Comments