Laptop mini-review

Good points:-

  • Not as big as I thought.
  • Not as heavy as I thought.
  • Everything works well under Windows (as expected).
  • Most things work nicely under Linux with a little tweeking.
  • The screen is pretty decent (though not as good as the really high priced standalone LCD displays).
  • In normal usage it doesn’t get very warm, especially in powersave mode.
  • It’s flippin fast in performance mode!
  • The keyboard’s nice.
  • The touchpad works well.

Bad points:-

  • The fan when it does come on is quite loud.
  • They didn’t include Bluetooth chip but left the (now useless) bluetooth button on the machine. (This is the top of the range model in the UK.)
  • Stand-by, suspend and hibernate don’t work under Linux.
  • The power supply cable (manufactured by Lite-On) is big and bulky.
  • The power cable has a right-angled plug but the power socket is on the back of the machine. This causes the cable to obscure the parallel port and makes it all too easy to accidently pull the cable from the socket when moving the machine.
  • The 3-in-1 SD/MMC/Memory Stick interface is not supported under Linux at all. (It uses the I2C bus attached to the ISA bus as it’s part of the Winbond monitoring chip.)
  • The Intel softmodem is only supported under the 2.4.x kernel by the Intel drivers.