Hi-res refurb Dell laptop. Comments?

[Michael Hill]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Ian Petersen <ispeters-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I own one of those.  Beautiful machine.

I use one at work. In 2007 I started with an M90, same form factor and
specs. We've had six Dell Mobile Precisions in my department (we call
them CAD laptops), with a better-than-50% failure rate on the video
card. When it died in my first M90, I switched to the spare and a Dell
technician replaced the card in the first one. When it failed in the
second M90, they told us the nVidia card was no longer available and
replaced it with a whole new M6400. We purchased the M6300 in
September 2008 and the latest M4600 (16GB RAM) about three months ago.
In January last year, the replacement video card in the first M90 died
and I switched to the M6300 as my desktop machine. The M6300 and M6400
are still running with their original nVidia cards; as if in
anticipation of your question, the one in the three-month-old M4600
died and was replaced by Dell this past week.

As for video drivers, I can't speak from experience because the
machines have only run Linux as VMware or VirtualBox client, with XP
as the host on all but the last one (Windows 7). My 2005 ThinkPad G41
has a 174-era nVidia card and had no issues with accelerated video
using openSUSE 11.4's nouveau driver.

Mike
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