Re: Beware new laptops
- From: Dave <foo@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:15:06 +0100
John Rivers wrote:
Hi
There are two things which make buying a laptop today VERY RISKY
- nearly all manufacturers only supply (and support) vista drivers
- this means you have no downgrade path in the event of problems
with applications
- gpu drivers for nvidia and ati mobile gpus are ONLY available via
the *laptop manufacturer*
- this means driver updates will be delayed and infrequent
- this means updates will STOP when the manufacturer wishes
these two facts mean buying a laptop today is not a good idea
my current pentium m laptop has up-to-date drivers for all components
downloaded
straight from the component manufacturer
this will not be possible with the current generation of laptops
because of this I have cancelled my plans to buy a $2000 laptop this
month
Watch out
There are other options available to you, such as installing Solaris or Linux. That gets you out of the Vista garbage, but you still need to check driver availability. I can't get the fingerprint reader working on my laptop with Solaris, but I can live without that. Sound, ethernet, WiFi USB, etc all work fine. Drivers are all built into Solaris - no need to download them!
Of course, Solaris or Linux is only possible if you don't need any Windows applications for which there are no equivalents. Reading/writing Word/Excell/Powerpoint/PDF files etc is no problem. But some specialist software might only be available on Windows.
.
- References:
- Beware new laptops
- From: John Rivers
- Beware new laptops
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