11:50 AM - Toshiba Laptops
I just purchased a Toshiba L305-S5955. It wasn't my first choice, and I had neglected to do proper research on a few points. This laptop comes with an Intel Celeron 900 2.2Ghz single core cpu, 2GB of RAM, 160GB hdd, Realtek pciE NIC (10/100) and a Realtek USB wifi 802.11b/g card. That's right, the wifi is on the USB bus inside the laptop.
Obviously, since we don't have native support for this wifi card and it's usb there is no way to use it. Our ndis wrapper does not support USB wifi devices.
Interestingly, the ethernet adapter does not work either. This is one of Realtek's newer parts and it is not supported by rl or re. Due to the pciE nature, I'm going to work on getting this integrated into re(4).
The laptop is fully supported in Ubuntu Linux, so we're certainly trailing on hardware support for newer systems.
The sad thing is the realtek card works much better in windows or ubuntu than my previous linksys pccard with a broadcom chipset. (yeah i really pick em)
Aside from the hardware support issues, I've been pleasantly surprised by the build quality of this laptop considering it's low cost. It's not at the same magnitude as my old T30 Thinkpad, but it's good.