Re: [LAU] buying a new laptop

Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> 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.

You move around a lot more and faster than I do on a touchpad!

>>> 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.

I don't think I've ever manually changed the backlight level on any of
my various laptops. My wife's netbook automatically dims. I found that
annoying initially, but it brightens back up when you do something with
it, so it's really minor.

Possible that those Fn+key combinations are activated by the laptop's
ACPI BIOS (or equivalent). I doubt many BIOSes are RT safe!

-- 
David
gnome@hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
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