Wow. Fast.
It’s kinda weird to have something running full speed, and only see half my CPU meter full.
That’s right, folks, daddy’s got a brand new toy. Specifically, a Dell Inspiron 640m:
Here’s the specs:
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667 MHz FSB)
14.1 inch WXGA+ 1440×900
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller
120GB SATA Hard Drive
8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R
Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 Internal Wireless
Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX Ethernet
Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter
IEEE 1394 (FireWire)
Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth
This is a huge step up from my previous 1.6GHz Turion (1289×768) in almost every respect, and let me tell you, it’s blazing fast. My compile speeds anywhere from 3 to 5 times faster than the old laptop.
Needless to say, after booting Vista once to make sure the hardware worked (Vista was not particularly impressive; it was slow, and it’s interface was hugely cluttered, even relative to XP), I wiped Vista off and loaded Gentoo. I have to say that I can now officially recommend this laptop to anyone using Linux. Everything in it works flawlessly. (Okay, I haven’t tried the bluetooth yet, but reports say it works great.) Literally the only prorpietary piece of software on the entire system at this point is the ipw3945d that sets the regulatory domain on the wireless, and even that will go once the new driver is available. Bravo Dell and Intel, this laptop is great.
The screen is really pretty, Gnome looks great, and I’m really enjoying the extra real estate.
Ooh, I have the same system! Although a slightly older version with the original Intel Core duo rather than core2.
It’s a really nice system, I especially like the quietness. Quirks so far have been:
– reading xD cards with the inbuilt card reader doesn’t work
(trying the sdhci driver, but I suspect the xD part requires its own driver entirely)
– ipw3945 crashes my system quite a lot (hard freeze, probable kernel panic on the console). I only use it on occasion anyway because I develop a driver for a USB-based wifi chip which I like to use as much as possible.
– 1440×900 resolution doesnt work without using i915resolution to patch the video BIOS on every boot. This issue will go away when the modesetting branch of xf86-video-i810 is stabilised (video BIOS won’t be used any more)
– bought a cardbus wifi card for driver development without realising that this laptop has the successor to cardbus instead. oops!
– seemant has the US version of this (the E1405 — can’t see any differences other than keyboard layout) and it blew up the other day (random crashes/freezes). hopefully not a sign of things to come for us!
I’d be interested to know which of these you do/don’t see as well.
Nice to know I’ll have help if needed.
My friend just got an Asus with the ipw3945 card, and he’s had a few problems to, but I have had only one problem: If I start the card eith neth.eth1, stop it, and then start networkmanager, the card acts as if the rfkill switch was hit, and doesn’t come back unless you remove and reload the module. However, since I don’t plan on using netl.eth1 anymore, I should be fine.
I did discover afer writing this post that it wasn’t cardbus in the thing. I have no idea if it’s supported.
The xD reader needs the xD driver.
It’s supposed to work based on pages I’ve seen, but I only have mmc, so I may never know.
I know about 915resoution; You’ll notice I didn’t say it worked flawlessly out of the box. But I’ll put up with a few, minor, temporary quirks for the level of support I have.