[LAU] buying a new laptop

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from david's message of 2011-09-05 11:11:39 +0200:
> Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> > Excerpts from Joel Roth's message of 2011-09-04 08:59:31 +0200:
> >> On Sat, Sep 03, 2011 at 05:49:19PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote:
> >>
> >>> I have owned a few ThinkPads in my day, and they do run
> >>> well with linux, but the ergonomics of the keyboards on
> >>> them irritate me so much, I'll never use another one.
> >> I'm happy with my T410; I ameliorate the ergonomics 
> >> by using a wireless USB mouse, and a compact
> >> USB keyboard.
> >>
> >> I disabled the touch pad, otherwise I 
> >> get spurious mouse clicks.
> > 
> > I use a really cheap Acer Extensa 5220, keyboard is ok for me, it has a
> > rather conventional layout compared to some laptops I've seen where
> > ESC/Shift/Enter/... where all over the place. The touchpad works ok for
> > me, although I started to use a mouse again when at home. Touchpad is ok
> > for the occasional pointing, but if you do point-heavy stuff it can go
> > so far that your fingertips heat up and you almost start to rub them
> > off.
> 
> I think that's where the fingertip-rolling technique comes in.

Fingertip-rolling only works for very small distances for me, so it
doesn't really help a lot.

> > The touchpad can be disabled using Fn+F7 but this happens pretty
> > much in hardware as far as I know and can lead to xruns (same goes for
> > backlight).
> 
> Toshibas have a function key combo that disables touchpad. I've never 
> noticed if it has any impact on xruns, cuz I usually use external 
> keyboard and trackball except on mobile recording trips (like recording 
> my church band this morning) - then I need the touchpad.
> 
> Can't imagine why backlighting would have any impact on xruns. I'd 
> figure that would be subsumed in the general impact of laptops' power 
> management hardware on things like processor or bus speeds.

I assume it has to do with hw-interrupts or somesuch. I'm talking about
manually changing the backlight level using the key combination, I use
little automatic power management features and nothing that changes
backlight automatically because to me that's just annoying.