I have a question that's not easily answered by looking at specs, is the
cooling the same in the HP 6730b and the HP DV5T? They are very similar,
they both are available with the 9400 processor and the Intel 4500
graphics chip, but one is a "business" laptop and one is a "consumer"
laptop. What I want to know is if they are really the same laptop and if
they can handle running at least one core flat out. My current laptop is
an old Compaq R3000z (first gen AMD64) that requires that I set the CPU
speed governor down to it's middle clock rate when I run Verilog
simulations or else it overheats and shuts down. My three major
requirements for it's replacement are support for 8G of RAM, Intel
Wireless, and the ability to run at it's rated speed on real loads.
The 6730b is available with Freedos, however the largest disk that they
offer with it is only 250G, the DV5T has 320G and 400G drives available
(the 320 is the sweet spot right now). Also a comparably equipped DV5T is
several hundred dollars cheaper than the 6730b even with the Windows Tax
(the cheapest option on that one is 32 bit Vista home). So if the cooling
is the same and the DV5T can support 8G I'll go with the DV5T (I'm
waiting for an answer from HP on the RAM limit).
BTW I've looked at Lenovos and Dells also. Dell's are obsolete, they are
shipping the old Centrino I chipsets not the current Centrino IIs, so
they are limited to 4G as far as I know, and they are using 65nm
processors instead of 45nm. The wireless chip in the Dell that I looked
at was also useless, Fedora didn't see it at all (it's almost certainly a
Broadcom, they do have an Intel available as an option on the XPS which
would fix the problem). Dell's are offered with Ubuntu so I would prefer
to buy from them, but the old technology is a show stopper. Lenovo has a
bad BIOS in the Sl500, it was the one laptop that I couldn't boot from my
Fedora 10 USB key, it would only see it after it had booted into Windows.
The consumer Lenovo, the Ideapad 530Y did boot fine but those aren't
available with decent processors, they are only available with low end
processors. All of the HPs that I tried booted Fedora with no trouble and
the wireless was automatically configured.
Linear Mode
