[plug] OT - Good product - A random comment.

[Garry]

Every now and then you find you are pleasantly surprised by something you have bought. This has happened to me. 

I bought a Toshiba M30 laptop late last year. It performs quite well under Linux, ripping DVDs pretty quickly, sound and graphics are really good too.

I recently tried a game under XP. (Yer, I know.. And the networking WAS really clumsy to set up.. ) It was Unreal Tournament. The 3d graphics performance is really smooth, and it is quite happy acting as the game server while playing too. It does have 512 Meg of RAM, (256M standard) and I guess this helps here. I haven't played games for years and only did recently to help entertain a 13 year old.. The damn game thing is addictive...  8^)==

The mission now is to get the NVidia drivers sorted under Linux (the tasks I've used it for so far have been fine without them..) and try to get UT running under Wine.. 

One down side with the machine.. The onboard e100 network port seems to not want to work under Linux, something which has been niggling me. But I have just found it doesn't want to play under XP too, so I may have a problem there. Naturally I'm confident the Toshiba (extended to 3 years) warranty will fix this! But the Xircom PCMCIA card suffices for now, until a Perth excursion..


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So if you are considering a laptop as a replacement for a desktop, go for it. Nvidia dedicated memory graphics card is worth considering when choosing.... Some laptops share the system RAM, some do it properly. 8^)==

The temptation to hook the UT session into the 21" NEC 6FGp monitor (from the Computer Angels carpark sale, $200 8^)==   ) is simply overwhelming...  

Garry.