Dell Laptops (was Re: [SlugBug] Re: Reminder - meeting tonight)

[Lesley Binks]

Mr. Adam ALLEN wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 15:50, Lesley Binks wrote:
> 
> 
>>I could have done with a quick chat about this ...
>>
>>Dell Latitude L400 PIII-700 Laptop
>>
>>I am scraping the cash together to buy one of these with floppy drive 
>>and CD rom drive.
>>
> 
> 
> I managed to blow a years student loan on the L400 brand new 3 years
> ago. I've since upgraded the memory to 256Mb / 30Gb drive. Mine is
> showing it's age now and is a bit bruised and battered. 
> 
> The only thing that doesn't work is ACPI, having to manually use APM. 
> 
> I've gone from Redhat 7.3 through to Fedora Core 2 (and once FC3 test 2
> comes out that will be thrown at it).
> 
> 
>>They are fairly old secondhand machines but I have been having a spot of 
>>bother with them.  The company I am buying from has been very good, 
>>replacing the complete unit when one wouldn't boot from hard disk, CD or 
>>floppy.
>>
>>I am now at the stage where I have a working floppy but still no CD 
>>working and the company is sending out a replacement.
>>
>>The CD drive is recognised, in both the BIOS and the minimal Win 98 
>>system but there is no way I can even get a directory listing of a known 
>>good disk, merely getting a CDR101 device not ready when reading error 
>>and the ubiquitous Abort, Retry Fail message.
>>
> 
> 
> I've hardly used my CD-drive in it's time- but it's flaky. I find that
> spinning the CD manually then 'slamming' shut gets disks recognised.
> Like you are seeing- the drive is recognised it just doesn't read the
> disks.
> 
> Since FC1 I've been booting from the network to fire off an
> installation, I never really have need for the CD apart from
> installation time. 

Adam

Thanks for this info and the notice about the flaky bits  :)

I have finally got a CD driver to work with it.

This is my first ever laptop and so I have had a few things to learn
e.g.

1. which way up the floppy drive sits (or alternatively which way up you 
put floopy disks in)
2. CD's need to sit on the spindle properly to be readable i.e. sit 
right down on the spindle.  They were floating in the other ones and 
this is what is wrong.  With the working drive, they sit fully and 
firmly on the spindle by applying a light pressure to get them to sit 
down on it.

Literally as basic as that. :->

I am not a huge one for advertising companies but I have to say that 
ITDealers (www.itdealers.co.uk) have been absolutely brilliant with 
excellent customer service.  I have not had to pay for any returns, they 
swapped the units and disk drives without making me feel like I was 
something they would wipe off their shoes if they stood in it etc etc
Lovely to get such response in this day and age.

I've yet to do anything networky with it.  Will look into that next week 
.  I would like to get a different distro on it and have a knoppix CD to 
play with too, so the system will be up and down like a yoyo for the 
next week or so.

Bits that I have found are flaky .... Suse 8.3 installed btw
1. Had to re-organise the boot order and put CD behind the HDD to get 
system to boot from HDD; Otherwise system hung at Dell boot up window
2. System continues to be flaky on system re-start.  OK if I power down 
and then power up again.

May need to re-install/de-install some of the window managers: Gnome 
would run properly and enlightenment seems a bit funny at times; had to 
use Ctrl-alt-del to get to logout dialog box that would respond to my 
request to logout.

It's an expensive toy but if it proves reliable then I'll be happy.
I'm more mobile these days so it will be useful to be able to continue 
doing things while away from the desktop.

I haven't tried ACPI yet so can't confirm if it works or not with Suse 
8.3 2.4.10 kernel.  (yes I know it needs updating).

Thanks for the info :)

Lesley