[KLUG Members] Just say NO to the new Toshiba laptop.

[Bruce Smith]

My employer recently bought a new Toshiba Satellite 5005-S504 laptop
with the hopes of running Linux on it.  Before the purchase I did a
little research (too little), I learned the NVidia video chipset was
supported, so we bought it.

This laptop is unlike any laptop I've ever seen before.  It's is one of
the NEW "legacy free" laptops.  What does that mean?  Well it's free of
all legacy devices (M$-XP thing ya know).  There is NO serial ports, NO
parallel port, NO PS/2 ports, NO floppy drive, NO APM, and best of all:
THERE IS NO USER INTERFACE TO THE BIOS.  Which means you cannot change
the "PnP OS" setting, because it doesn't exist!  That means EVERY DEVICE
is PnP and must be assigned a IRQ by the operating system.

After a lot of fighting trying to make Linux work on this thing, I got
Linux to assign IRQ's to some devices, but even then, it was flaky.  I
would get random crashes upon bootup, and X would _randomly_ screw up
the screen to something unreadable requiring a reboot, other times X
would work fine.  And even the keyboard wouldn't work right in X.

Fair warning, this is being pushed hard by M$ so hardware vendors can
build a "XP certified PC", and until Linux support improves, beware of
new PC hardware configurations!!!

OTOH, if you want to run _only_ XP, this is probably a very nice PC.
I'm not sure if you can even install older versions of windows on it.

Also, I could find NOTHING about this new "legacy free" crap on
toshiba.com, and the only way to learn this is from their tech support,
and that's only IF you can get to the right tech support person.

There is a lot of talk about this PC on Google Groups, and there are a
lot of unhappy Linux users.

Needless to say, this laptop was returned and something else ordered.

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Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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