Hey Phil,

Phil Astley wrote:
>>I just bought an Acer Travelmate 291LMi - presumably this is available
>>in NZ as it is in Australia.
> 
> 
> That's really interesting. I have to confess I hadn't even contemplated
> someone from over the ditch having experience with this. Of course you
> are right - we have Acer over here.
>  
> 
>>Haven't even tried to get the modem to work - but pcmcia modems are
>>relatively easy to pick up on ebay - and the pccard controller in the
>>laptop is recognised by the IBM TI Driver.
> 
> I'll check out the specs and see what I can find about the modem - seems
> a waste to have to use a PCMCIA card.
Modem appears to be some kind of Intel AC97 thingy that isn't supported 
- although I havent yet checked out all the linux sites to see what 
those guys are doing.

>>Video is currently only working in GenGradd mode as the Intel 855GM
>>chipset isn't yet supported by Snap - but in normal usage - you wouldn't
>>even know.
> 
>> Not sure what that means - but I could probably live with that.
It means its running the screen using generic VESA/VBE mode - no 
hardware acceleration - but so far - I haven't even noticed - haven't 
been playing video etc much yet.

>>No OS/2 drivers for the built-in Intel Wireless networking chipset - but
>>am using a Linksys pcmcia card for Wireless with no problems with eCS 1.1
> 
> 
> Don't have a need for wireless - presumably it comes with a normal
> ethernet port?
Yep - Realtek 8139 built in - works fine with the driver supplied with 
eCS 1.1.

>>Other than that it's running great - Centrino 1.4, DVD burner, 512mb RAM..
> 
> Sounds promising - I will look into it. Thanks.
Nice and quick too :) Looks like it's already supersede with a model 
that has a Centrino 1.5 but an extra $A100 too!

> BTW, I've been told these Centrino chips are roughly equivalent
> performance-wise to P4's nearly twice the speed - e.g. 1.4 would be
> equal to about 2.4 or so. Do you have any gut feel about the validity of
> that in your system?
Ive heard the same.  Without running sysbench to check - everything 
seems just as fast as the Athlon 2600 system I have in the study. 
Pentium-M chip has 1mb of cache which certainly helps.

I'll run sysbench later and see how the CPU stacks up vs the desktop PC 
:)  Good excuse to get around to it.

I got the Centrino mainly for battery life reasons.. Acer claim up to 
5.5 hours.. I've had >3.5 hours with eCS 1.1 - without the speedstep 
support working properly (speedstep is supposed to slow the processor 
down when it's idle to save power).

Cheers,

Paul


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