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IT's Love-Hate Relationship With Laptops
Ian Lamont writes "Are laptops really as great as they're cracked up to be? We love their portability, and we've been charting the steady rise of laptop sales for years. Yet while many of us depend on them for work, our IT departments view them with mixed feelings. IT managers point to wi-fi configuration, complicated authentication procedures, and eight other issues as making their jobs a lot harder. What else is missing from the list of laptop limitations? What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"
Try running syndaemon on your login. This little program is included with the synaptics X driver and it disables the touch pad while you are typing and reenables it automaticaly after a specified timeout (I have mine set to 2 seconds).
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You can't just throw a graphics chip into a laptop as an afterthought: the entire machine has to be designed around the thermal profile of both the CPU and the GPU. Given how marginal laptop cooling systems are, an increase of 5W in GPU power output might be enough to overheat the system.
A laptop really isn't designed to be upgradeable - the good ones, especially so. They're integrated systems, carefully engineered for structural strength and heat dissipation. The only laptops that could accomodate a modular graphics interface are the cheap 17" ABS monsters.