[LAU] high-powered laptop suggestions ?

[Karl Hammar]

Ken:
> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:34:49AM +0200, Karl Hammar wrote:
...
> > I am testing an Asus one (AS96SP965PM2) for the moment which I might
> > resell for 4160SEK+vat (that would be something like 250USD). To make
> > a working notebook you have to add cpu, disk, memory, and software.
> > Also check whether keyboard, batteries and power adapter is included.
...
> I have an ASUS barebone Z96F, into which I plopped a 2.33Ghz 7500
> Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (which ASUS said wasn't supported, but it works
> fine), 2GB RAM, and a 100GB 7500RPM PATA drive (which also wasn't
> supported). So basically I built myself MacBook Pro, for a little over
> US$1000 at the time.

Nice.

> Only trouble I ran into, is that using a PATA drive on these laptops
> is a BAD IDEA. That's because there is no PATA interface in computer!
> The chipset only understands SATA, and there's a goofy, lousy, crappy
> hack somewhere on the motherboard that makes the PATA drive appear as
> a SATA drive to the rest of the machine. Thus: the BIOS doesn't even
> recognize my drive. However, the linux drivers have no problem with
> this, and the drive works fine once I tell the BIOS to boot anyway
> even though it thinks there are no drives in the machine.

The above one have a SATA HD and an PATA CD. Both are seen and
reported by the BIOS. I wounder if I could boot from the SD-adapter in 
the computers front.

I just got the modem to work. Next thing is to make resume from a 
X-session, and suspend to ram (text mode suspend to disk/resumer works
fine).

Do you know how to access the BIOS, there seem to be no key-combinations
to get into the bios-setup at boot.

Regards,
/Karl