On 3/16/07, Robert Jonsson <rj(a)spamatica.se> wrote: The non-Pro Macbook feels very underpowered to me. Keep in mind they all use the dreaded HDA intel for onboard audio... Lee

On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 05:27:50PM +0100, Pieter Palmers wrote: I don't know. Configuring low Dell Inspirons to have dual core 64 bit, a gig of ram, bluetooth, and usable wireless comes out not all that much cheaper than a MacBook. Of course, I don't know if the MacBook's wireless works nicely with linux.

On Sat, Mar 17, 2007 at 11:27:31AM +0100, Robert Jonsson wrote: Under OS X, MacBook graphics feels good enough for general work. Blender runs decently. I would imagine that Shake would work decently. I guess FCP and After Effects would probably suffer. We already know that Motion suffers a lot. I'd rather deal with Intel 950 graphics than Radeon X1xx0 or Nvidia on a laptop. My idea laptop for linux would be dual core 64bit, and use Mobility Radeon x300, but nobody seems to use that for the newer CPUs. When Nouveau is usable, things might change.

On 3/17/07, Paul Winkler <pw_lists(a)slinkp.com> wrote: Background noise I would say... and some huge issues with interrupt handling (but that's any cards on any laptops...) which makes is very hard not to have xruns. __________________ Marc-Olivier Barre, Markinoko.

On 3/17/07, Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote: Apple ? The ones that put video capabilities on the audio output of their iPod, thus creating the worst of bad quality audio output ever ? Since when do they care about audio quality ? I am very well aware of the unusefulness of my statement ;-) I just had to react to this. Something is fatal to Apple only when it comes to money, not hardware quality. This is true for 90% of technological goods out there. Quality is Just a Marketing Argument (TM) __________________ Marc-Olivier Barre, Markinoko.

On Sun Mar 18, 2007 at 12:54:45PM +0100, Marc-Olivier Barre wrote: i do find some of the smaller companies do differentiate on quality, since they can't (afford) to differentiate on heavy marketing/branding/advertising. f'example ive never had anything from LiteON suck in any way. and nothing has gone wrong with my MSI notebook in 16 months. and of course they also differentiate on features. not that iRiver/iAudio's FM tuner, longer batter life, FLAC and ogg support, line in, ability to record from line in or FM, video codecs people actually use like Xvid, standard filesystem schema, and lower price all combined are enough to nullify the power of Apple's marketing/aura/distortion-field in the mind of the average consumer-slave...

On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 02:51:31PM -0400, carmen wrote: Much as I love my iRiver HP120's feature set, it suffers from a really really bad UI. I keep meaning to try Rockbox to see if it's any better, but I haven't had the time. And that won't help people trying out stuff in a store. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com

On 3/17/07, Paul Winkler <pw_lists(a)slinkp.com> wrote: The hardware design gives vendors way too much flexibility in how they wire it up, resulting in the driver having to be updated every time a new laptop/mobo comes out. The driver is supposed to be able to retrieve this info from the BIOS but vendors don't bother to do it right and just hard code the pin configs in their proprietary driver. So unless some developer has the exact same laptop as you, it's possible that your sound will never work exactly right. This is a huge regression from intel8x0/AC97 which Just Worked most of the time. Yeah that one was pretty bad too. Lee

Johannes Mario Ringheim wrote: Your links got me to this: [http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/107/macbook-pro-noise-update] Now that doesn't sound too good... Pieter

Lee Revell wrote: back it up and I buy a MacBook. Pieter PS: not on tape plz.

david wrote: But a little overpriced maybe: DELL's completecare multicover (accidential damage, theft, robbery, ...) is 322€ for 3 years over here. Apple's extension to 3 year warranty is 449€, and I can't find anything on theft or damage. I've dealed with DELL customer service before and the feelings are mixed... sometimes it was very good, sometimes it wasn't. But everything got fixed in the end. My personal experience is limited to a few lattitude 620, 810 and 820's from family & friends, and up till now they are working fine. The issues that arised were a LAN port blowup (probably due to lightning as the ADSL router also started acting weird), and two 'a few bad sector' harddisk failures (IBM/hitachi drives). Everything was repaired on-site, and rather quick. I currently have a 'white-book' i.e. a rebranded Uniwill. But the Dutch rebrander decided that it wasn't profitable anymore to assemble laptops in the Netherlands, and therefore they stopped their business (and their customer support). Currently my laptop's dvd drive causes the laptop to fail booting when it is inserted. It works in other laptops however, so it's an internal problem. Needless to say that my feelings regarding customer support (and white-branded stuff) have changed. Difficult... Greets, Pieter

On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 00:31 +0100, Christoph Eckert wrote: Yeah, Dell on-site service is awesome. I've had some pointer stick trouble with my D820 and the service has been beyond my expectations. For Dell (at least in Finland), next business day means it's fixed on the next business day - not when they would take it in for repairs. This is the basic support package included with the laptop. Even with the (repeated) issues with the pointer device, I am very happy with this laptop. Sure it would've been cheaper without the service plan (hence much lower prices from other vendors not providing the service), but as this is my main box I can't afford to have it sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting to be repaired. Mind you, this is a Latitude, not an Inspiron which seems to have a bad reputation. MBP does not have a PCMCIA slot. I use a multiface. I would've gladly bought a macbook, but it simply wouldn't have worked for me. True, this 1920x1200 screen is quite nice. Although it could be a bit brighter. Sampo

On 3/17/07, Christoph Eckert <ce(a)christeck.de> wrote: Hi, FWIW, a friend of mine worked for Dell (in the customer support service) to optimize there processes. We've talked about a few times... Dell works this way. The thing they are best at is fixing computer hardware (I would like, as a professional, to get this kind of service when I open a case at sun's CS with my golden whatsoever contract number) What's dell's secret to sell cheap computers ? They are so good (and efficient in their processes) at fixing poor quality hardware that it's more interesting for then to just replace 5 times the same components than to build a computer with good quality ones. It makes the computer cheaper, and as Sampo said, when there's a problem, it's fixed fast. So it's just transparent to the user. __________________ Marc-Olivier Barre, Markinoko.

Well it was "The plural of anecdote is not data" apparently, quote was courtesy of Lee Revell I believe. Great quote even if not technically grammatically correct. Seablade

On Sat, Mar 17, 2007 at 10:50:03AM -0400, Thomas Vecchione wrote: The iBook G3 (dual USB) and MacBook both have 6 pin firewire ports. Are you saying they are 6 pins without actually supplying power? I don't have any firewire powered devices to test with.

Thomas Vecchione wrote: Of course decent firewire is a huge plus for me (as a freebob developer). However, the lack of cardbus on MBP is a serious con, as I frequently need 2 host controllers for testing, and it is convenient to have a built in and a cardbus one for that. Pieter

Jesse hit it on the head. Expresscard is FINALLY starting to get to a point where I no longer consider it a LARGE detractor to have it instead of PCMCIA. But also as Jesse pointed out, I have no clue how good the linux support of said cards is. Seablade

FWIW, I own a 1st gen MBP, a 3+ year old eMachines notebook, a 6-year old Dell Inspiron and have worked with just about anything from SGI workstations to custom-built-from-scratch PCs. While owning MBP, I only had one battery recall. However, this is not because there are no other problems, but rather because Apple refuses to recognize them as such. Here are some of the perpetuating issues seconded by various blogs/sites (please note that while some of these pertain only to the first-gen MBPs, consider them as a broader view of Apple's offering): 1) I can't keep it on my lap since it is scalding hot as soon as the laptop reaches its operating temperature. Heck, at times I cannot even keep my wrist on the computer as the left side gets uncomfortably warm. FWIW, I also run a fan applet at all times which keeps fan running at constant speeds of 2000+ RPM. Let's just say this does not help much. 2) There is a CPU whine which according to some reports can pollute recording even if it is only recording internal "silence" (no mic internal or external). 3) Uselessly positioned microphone which prevents its use for video conferencing due to its dubious proximity to the speaker. 4) Very fragile slot-loading drives (this has been pretty much the case since Ti powerbooks) 5) Underclocked x1600 (only on first-gen 15-inch MBPs) so that its performance is hardly that of a x1400. 6) Design flaws such as hard edges on the laptop (once opened) forcing you to type most of the time with your hands in the air and the ubiquitous one-button mouse 7) whatever you buy from Apple first-gen, please be prepared to be their beta tester for free. Regarding reliability, I have students every so often knocking on my doors with crashing Macbooks, often for very dubious reasons, so this leads me to believe that if you don't know what you are doing, you will crash just about any OS on the planet. While DELL is a far cry from what it used to be future looks more hopeful with Michael Dell back. FWIW, my memories of dealing with them quite a while ago lean slightly to the positive side. I remember buying a refurb Inspiron 8000 with 800MHz P3 when 1GHz was pretty much the limit. In a matter of a month the motherboard died. Over the next year after two exchanges (one of this was my fault, the other was the aforesaid motherboard issue) I ended up with a 1.8GHz P4 Inspiron 8200 with more RAM and better video plus 1600x1200 screen. Eventually I upgraded Geforce2Go to Geforce4Go and added some memory. Later I also had an option of going to Radeon 9000 but never bothered to since by that time I had moved onto my new laptop. 6 years later this laptop still works just fine. My next purchase was M6807 from eMachines. This thing to this day continues to run despite 2 high drops, spilled soy sauce over the keyboard and generally ~8+ hours of daily use. Now that it is over 3 years old, its battery lasts only ~30-40 minutes (ironically the battery levels show 0% after few minutes of use, but the notebook can run for another 20-30 minutes even after that point as long as you disable mandatory shutdown in power settings) and there are visible blemishes due to use, but so far it seems to be still working ok. This is not to say that I did not have to send it in two times over this period of time, once to repair a cracked hinge (part of a recall) and once because of a faulty BIOS update. Are either Dell or eMachines as pretty as my MBP? No way. Do they have their own quirks and/or issues? You bet. Are they as functional? Pretty much so. What should you get? My advice is don't listen to individual experiences as they are commonly very biased. Rather, look for what is within your budget and perhaps more importantly what you are most comfortable with. Do some hands-on research on your own and take the plunge (many companies nowadays allow purchases with an unconditional 30-day return policy; my suggestion is use this as an opportunity to make an informed decision). Best wishes, Ivica Ico Bukvic, D.M.A. Composition, Music Technology, CCTAD, and CHCI Virginia Tech Dept. of Music - 0240 Blacksburg, VA 24061 (540) 231-1137 (540) 231-5034 (fax) ico(a)vt.edu http://www.music.vt.edu/people/faculty/bukvic/

See my last sentence in my paragraph. Namely, get an eval for 30 days, road-test it and then make your own decision. All the latest bells'n'whistles here and no change. I upgraded to 10.4.9 the other day which also elegantly broke Max/MSP, after which I had to do combo reinstall of 10.4.9. 300MB later I think I have everything up and running again. Since I have automatic updates enabled at all times, I get all the latest goodies (including those which tend to hose my system ;-)... My MBP wireless ran ok in Linux while I test-drove Ubuntu on it (unlike OSX it does not lose connectivity for no reason with non-Airport access points--granted this has been mostly fixed by the latest 10.4.9 OSX update). Come to think of it, I had built a nice version of the backlit keyboard daemon which would dynamically adjust the backlight by reading light conditions, and it would do so with a nice fading action, but now I wonder whether I wiped that stuff off before I got to back it up... DOH! But I digress... Regarding the wireless, I unfortunately can't remember for sure if it was native or not. IIRC it was atheros chipset driver (FWIW, I am not running Linux on it any more due to inherent EFI problems with having more than 4 partitions on the drive which makes installing Linux next to OSX and Bootcamp kludge-like triple-booting solution--I'd wipe the MBP clean but I need OSX+Bootcamp for my teaching; hence I resorted to a dedicated Linux notebook, rather than the triple-booting inferno). Best wishes, Ico

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 OK, <exasperated sigh>, I have to ask this: Are there any laptops out there WHICH DO NOT SUCK??! This is very frustrating. It seems as though, no matter what I choose, I will be making a potentially huge mistake. So, this is why I buy nothing. BTW, in the Linux and BSD wireless world a few years ago there was a general consensus that ThinkPads were amazing/fantastic/perfect machines. They were considered the most "road-worthy" and I saw BAWUG guys walking around carrying their open ThinkPads around by the LCD, casually throwing them around like a roadie throws around an SM58, with no ill effects. I had a couple for years (a used 600 and a used 600E) and I just beat the piss out of them. Even though they were made in Italy, I found them to be like the BMW's of laptops. They were engineered to be abused. But, I don't recall hearing a peep about ThinkPads from this group, which leads me to wonder if perhaps they are not suited for audio for some reason or another? Maybe they don't have the latest/greatest dual-core CPU's on them yet? Or maybe IBM's installation of "Treacherous Computing" chips in the things made Linux users steer clear of them? - -ken

Toshiba, IBM Thinkpad, Sony have all been fine in my experience. My Linux laptop experience is limited to Toshiba, where everything just worked on two different models. I understand that Sony hardware is not Linux friendly. Ken Restivo wrote: -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On Tuesday 20 Mar 2007 05:25, Ken Restivo wrote: I have access to a new SZ series Vaio, and I can confirm that it's an absolute pig to get going with Linux. Lovely machine, but it no longer looks as lovely as I had thought. Chris

Arnold Krille wrote: I second Arnolds statement, I got also an Asus A6000 and at least I would say it sucks less. I got a single core Turion 64 with Nvidia graphics and I run 64Studio with the propritary Nvidia drivers on it which I need for my art. Works fine and got low latency out of the box but Linux should be started with ACPI set to off. PD is a bit of a pain in 64bit as Arnold said but so far I use the stock pd and compiled only the externals I missed and needed. Soon I will try to compile a whole pd from cvs, maybe its better. Some statements of some pd users about 64 bit are a bit strange indeed. I compiled csound 5 and it worked well after I learned how to start it with a good priority so it didnt get interrupted when running in realtime. Ardour works great and also video applications like Xjadeo and Cinelerra which certainly benifits from 64bit. There is some electrical bleeding on the audio output which is also on external cards like RME Hammerfall Multiface. Balanced cables or playing from battery helps. Cheers, Malte -- Malte Steiner media art + development -www.block4.com-

On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 10:05:21PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote: I liked my previous generation Thinkpad (R50). I only "upgraded" because it was stolen. I had some trouble with the firewire (I never persued it, but I couldn't make a Miranda DV-Bridge+ work), but everything else just worked perfectly under the first version of Ubuntu I tried on it (5.10 I think. Before that it had RHEL3, which had numerous problems with wireless and power saving features). I would say that that thinkpad was a very solid machine. The r60s with Intel graphics look good as well. Alas, current Thinkpads with ATI graphics now use X1x00 chips, which I refuse to graple with. Some current thinkpads use Intel graphics, which I would be happy with, but they don't offer the best LCDs with Intel graphics. Still, they do offer a nice 1400x1050 display, with Intel, which is better than I've seen offered with Intel graphics from anyone else.

Marc-Olivier Barre wrote: Is this also true for their high-end models? You can configure almost exactly the same machine as an Inspiron, Lattitude or Precision. But the price tag is seriously different. I would expect that there is some difference to justify the price difference? Pieter

2007/3/19, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt;om>: Turning off the 3D- or surround effects for wider stereo could help. These simulate wider stereo fields with rather simple (and bad) methods. Turn them off and see if the echo is away. And check if the problem is still there on linux (with a bootable-cd) where these stereo-effects are switched off most times. Arnold -- visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/ --- Wenn man mit Raubkopien Bands wie Brosis oder Britney Spears wirklich verhindern könnte, würde ich mir noch heute einen Stapel Brenner und einen Sack Rohlinge kaufen.

Dave Phillips wrote: Could be a property set in their audio device driver, not something set in mixer. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Arnold Krille wrote: My wife has been using Linux on her Toshiba laptop for 4-5 years now. She'd been using Windows 2000 on a Sony Vaio SuperSlim Pro before that. She's a non-techie computer user - email, web browsing, writes fiction and non-fiction, occasionally listens to audio. She's been very happy to not worry about Windows worms and viruses, and she likes the multiple desktop capabilities - she's always changing desktop backgrounds and having multiple desktops just means she can have multiple backgrounds ... She's not completely switched - she likes WordPerfect 9 - so we use Win4Lin to run an old copy of Windows98 under Linux. But she does everything else with native Linux apps. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Greetings: Many thanks to all who responded in this thread. Alas, I've found no way to eliminate the echo effect on Ivy's Inspiron. I altered every mixer setting I could find, nothing changed the (very irritating) effect. So the Inspiron gets a "No way!" vote from me re: its on-board sound facilities. Nice machine otherwise though. Best, dp

On 3/19/07, Arnold Krille &lt;arnold.krille(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You do realize that you can just drag it over there in Windows? ;-) Lee

I have DELL Inspiron 9300, dual boot with XP and linux on it. I can hear no audible artifacts with it, and I'd say it sounds pretty good to me knowing that it's only a laptop with internal audio interface. Mine has nVidia graphics card (I think some Inspirons may have ATI, and - of course you know that better than me - graphics card may have an influence on the audio). best regards, Michal Kostrzewa

On 3/19/07, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; wrote: I guess you already tried installing the latest drivers from the vendor, and if that did not work to remove any vendor drivers and replace them with Microsoft's? Lee

On Monday 19 March 2007, Dave Phillips wrote: Boot up a linux live cd and look at the output of lspci -v. Maybe it tells you some more about the sound hardware.. Flo -- Palimm Palimm! http://tapas.affenbande.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 02:14:35PM +0100, Arnold Krille wrote: Are they available in the USA? I've heard people rave about ASUS products for years (i.e. wifi stuff) but I don't recall seeing them in shops here. I suppose I could order them online but the cost might be higher with duties, shipping, etc. - -ken

Not quite. Servers also have server motherboards which apparently are much higher quality hw and bios than consumer motherboards, such as "Security" feature which requires password *after* a potentially malicious user has had an option to trash your RAID array via BIOS raid menu (courtesy of ASUS). Best wishes, Ico