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I can TOTALLY believe Alienware doing that.

I had the hardest time getting my first review, and I am going to tell you the freaking back alley of the custom computer game...

  Almost NONE of these guys are building their own systems...

They are white boxing them from Sager and other distributors.

Yea, They come across as these big system builders, but it's all smoke and mirrors... a distributor like Sager builds the systems, ships the systems and supports the systems.


  That's the fact!
 

  http://www.killernotebooks.com/

... for the select few - 100% built, supported, warrantied by REAL GAMERS!

  The Killer Notebooks Executioner gives Eurocom their last rites... Tom's hardware Review:

  http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/10/16/eurocoms_di vine_duo_and_killer_notebooks_executioner/

The hard drive is currently NTFS in a USB 2.0 enclosure, so I can just bring the drive and connect it easily. I want to be able to write to the drive from both Windows and Linux. Also, since they are living in the dorms, the firewall blocks many things such as Samba.

I have the MX700 mouse, with 2 thumb buttons and the scroll buttons above and below the scroll wheel. I believe I can use imwheel to capture the thumb button events (8 and 9). xmodmap only works on the corepointer, which I have the touchpad set as. I do like the scroll buttons working as default, though.

My keyboard is the Logitech keyboard that came with the mouse (MX Duo). The buttons I am referring to are the volume wheel and the buttons such as Media, media control (Play, Stop, Forward, Back), Web.
These buttons used to work perfectly using lineakd, but some update broke them so they no longer generate events in xev, despite having set the keyboard to the appropriate model, "logiinkse", in xorg.conf. Also, lineakd now just gives me a string of xkbsetmap errors when I start it.

As for Apple, if they come out with a 17" core duo with a keyboard that fits me (like the HP) and an exterior with the right connectors (not that I'd use them all), then I'd love to get one; however, I'd still need to run Windows for games -- and that would have to be Vista.
Vista so far has incomplete drivers (current ATI vista drivers have some functions like tv-out disabled). Vista 5270 has moved many options around just for the hell of it -- display control panel tabs are separated into different places, for example.

The HP:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2 681
http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/01/11/hp_pavilion _dv8000z_is_big_heavy_and_full_of_features/
Vista current build screenshots:
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5270. asp

2 things I hate:
IGPs (even if ATI or NVIDIA, I still want more power -- I want HL2 at 1680x1050 if at all possible)
Companies moving things around just for the hell of it so you can't find anything

In terms of absolute performance, I believe AMD's chips are fine. But in terms of performance per watt, they are absolutely horrible. Intel-based machines will run much cooler and quieter, and last a lot longer on batteries, simply because the CPU is enormously more efficient.

P.

You have no idea what you're talking about. The Celeron M is a smaller cache version of the Pentium M; The Celeron D is the cheap version of the Pentium 4/D. While I agree that the Celeron D is a sucky processor, the grandparent is right, it's more than adequate for any non-gaming tasks.

Furthermore, benchmarking has shown that the Celeron M is just as good as a Pentium M at the same clock speed. Which is probably why the fastest Celeron M chips Intel sells are 1.8Ghz; anything faster would cannibalize Pentium M sales (also, the Celeron M doesn't step down its speed to conserve power, which is what the poster before you was talking about).

It gives a good handle on the AMD chips for laptops. All in all it holds it own with the Pentium M, where the Pentium M has a good lead is in power saving.

Also the AMD flagship laptop chip is 64bit so you would see a big jump in performace if you were to run a 64bit OS/Apps as you would except.

I like the look of the AMD chips over all and feel that Intel has drop the ball on the x86 market and put the eggs in the Intamin basket. And that ship is going down faster than Kate Mose can do a line :P

It gives a good handle on the AMD chips for laptops. All in all it holds it own with the Pentium M, where the Pentium M has a good lead is in power saving.

Also the AMD flagship laptop chip is 64bit so you would see a big jump in performace if you were to run a 64bit OS/Apps as you would except.

I like the look of the AMD chips over all and feel that Intel has drop the ball on the x86 market and put the eggs in the Intamin basket. And that ship is going down faster than Kate Mose can do a line :P