Just wanted to tell you that today my all new woderful notebook arrived (thanks again, Ygor - great tip!). I had to make some small adjustments and probably you are interested in my experiences, so here we go:

The original plan was to buy a I5 system, because i have no performance problems at all. Shortly after placing the order the dealer called to tell me that with a 2-core processor the system only knows about 8GB RAM. Well, he gave a special price for the upgrade and i can't bring myself to be disappointed about having more processing power now than perhaps i ever will need (i wonder when i ever will grow up and buy only what i need, not what is cool, hip and fast - *sigh*).

Anyway, this was my final system, which came for a price of EUR 3113,-, including VAT:

HP Elitebook Mobile Workstation 8740W
non-glare WUXGA display 1920x1200
Intel I7-740QM
16GB DDR-3 RAM PC10600 CL9
ATI Fire graphics, 1GB local memory
256GB Crucial C300 SSD

My first impression was very good: it looks very solid, is less noisy than my old notebook (a HP Pavilion dv7) and compared to the closed-shop BIOS of its predecessor the BIOS is filled with options.

The old one had a "BIOS tuning program" or something such instead - which ran exclusively under Windoze, naturally. Thank you for nothing! I don't want to install a complete OS every time i want to change the boot order.

Anyway, the new thing looks a lot more professional - built for work, not for watching videos while archiving last holidays photos.

I put in an old Ubuntu 9.04 CD i happen to find in my - well, you really don't want to see my software archive, LOL - and try to start up. The displays resolution and quality is breathtaking and i had to take some time just to look at this absolutely phantastic screen. I'm really looking forward to work with this baby.

The downside is that no network is working: there is no WLAN device, suggesting that i have to find the right driver module, but even eth0 is missing and i can't configure a cable-bound network. The output of "ifconfig" only shows 2 devices, "lo0" and "pan0", i don't know what to make of that.

Well, let's see what an up-to-date Fedora version (15) can do with the hardware, so i am downloading the installation DVD right now (3.3GB - that takes a while). I will tell you tomorrow what happened.

bakunin