New Laptop

So this semester I graduate from LCC with a Associates Degree in Information Systems. Since it has taken almost 5 years to attain a 2 year degree what with work and increasing family size, I decided to buy myself the ultimate laptop to celebrate. Truth be told my aging desktop was starting to act a little quirky and my old laptop had never been the same since my son Chase spilled a entire cup of Beaner's Coffee into it. What I wanted to do was replace both units with the ultimate in power and mobile design. I did quite a bit of research and ended up deciding on the HP DV 8030US. This laptop has the AMD Turion 64 ML-40 running at 2200 Mhz and a gig of RAM. Add to this dual 100 gig harddrives and were talking some serious computing power even for a desktop. The laptop also includes HP QUICKPLAY which lets you play CD's, DVD's and MP3's without booting up the computer. Since the laptop runs Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 it includes a integreted IR remote that slides securely into the unused pcmcia slot. I say unused because the Laptop also includes internal 802.11 A/B/G and Bluetooth, which means I can connect to any type of wireless network in use today including my Cingular GPRS account through my Bluetooth enabled Pocket PC Phone:)

The first thing I did after opening the box was partition the second harddrive in 2 creating 30 gig for Suse 10 and 70 gig for media files. This left the first 100 gig drive for Windows, my programs and mp3's and Pictures. I had anticipated using my external wifi card for Suse but was able to get the internal one working using the NDIS wrapper that ships with Suse 10 NICE!
At this point I have everything working under Suse with the exception of the integrated media card reader. At this point I dont have much hope for this as it is a rare pci type reader currently not supported by Linux. I did also have a beta copy of Windows Vista running wich worked very well also, but since Vista uses a new type of secure bootloader it didnt play well with Grub. If you are interested in booting Windows, Vista and Suse it can be done by creating a Lilo boot file and chainlinking to it from the Windows XP bootloader. Essentially what happens is you boot into the Vista bootloader, select Legacy(Windows XP) which boots the windows XP Bootloader where you can then select Windows XP or Suse 10. For more info just google search booting LiLo from the NTBootloader (NTLDR).