acertimeline team mailing list archive

[Sean Russell <seanerussell@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Marco Amadori <marco.amadori@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Monday 22 June 2009 20:12:04 Sean Russell wrote:
> > Here's another 4810 experience:
>
> Welcome!


Thanks.


> > I replaced the internal harddrive with a 30GB OCZ SSD that I had
> ...
> This is a great move, how much does this beast costs?


That's a funny story.  First, I lied.  It's a 64GB.  I bought it a few
months ago for near $200 for my laptop, which I thought had a SATA
interface.  It doesn't; it has an IDE interface.  You can't return these
once you unpack them, so I was stuck with it; I knew we'd be getting my wife
a new laptop, so I wasn't too broken up about it.  I then bought a 64GB IDE
Transcend for around $150 and have been using it in my TC4200.

When we got the Acer, my wife played around with Windows for a while, then
asked me to put Linux on it.  Really, I think that's only because she knows
that she's going to have to admin her own machine if she runs Windows, and
(to be honest) there's not much difference for her.  So, I threw the SSD in
there and put Ubuntu on it.

So, they're not too bad.  Not as cheap as HDDs, but I love the silence and
the extra battery life.  She's got the display on hers at about half
brightness, and the wifi on, and we're getting pretty close to the 8 hrs.  I
need to play with the eco-button and if that makes any difference.  Has
anybody here done any timings?

You know, if the Acer had a docking port, I'd think about replacing my HP
with one.  The Acers are really inexpensive, and so far, I really like it.

The fan on my HP comes on way more often than it does on the Acer, but with
the SSDs they're both dead silent, otherwise.  In fact, I don't think I've
heard the Acer's fan come on when it is on battery, yet.  It's a nice change
from her old laptop, which we used to heat the main floor of the house; the
fans on that thing were only off for the first two minutes after you booted.


> > get to GRUB) and then rebooted; when it came up, I went into the BIOS
> > and changed the interface from AHCI (or whatever it was) to IDE; that
> > fixed it.  It booted without problems directly into KDM.
>
> I prefer to boot with libata.noacpi=1 until properly fixed.


Doesn't that interfere with suspend/resume?  I guess if it is targetted at
the *ATA interface, then it might not.


> Yes, blame plasma-network-manager, I installed wicd and everything worked
> as
> expected.


Hm.  The only problem with wicd (which I like a lot, BTW) is that I can't
get it configured to connect to the company wireless network, which is WPA.
It won't let me close the darned config window unless I fill in everything,
but the only data that *should* be required are the CA and client certs.
Anyway, that's a topic for a different forum.


> >    7. Suspend/resume worked with no problems.  In fact, it's got the
> >       *fastest* resume of any laptop I've seen -- it is incredible.
>
> Probably because of SSD.


Really?  Yours isn't blindingly fast?  It was just as fast under Windows,
though, which was on an HDD, so I don't think it's the SSD.  If I were
hibernating, then, yeah... I could see that.

So... has anybody found anything out about that touchpad toggle button?
Does it work for anybody?

--- SER