Hi Alex,
Thanks for the review.
The issue about Linux, I've seen several posts on the information superhighway about this exact issue, in relation to the various Philips X series laptops (or Twinheads as they seem to be)

It seems the booting issue is something to do with the network card drivers being wrongly assigned by the OS. I've seen a couple of posts where people have gotten round the issue with some tweaking, and others suggesting that very recent kernel builds of their chosen distro get around the issue.

Anyway, after various phone calls to PC World and Dixons, Partmaster et al I've decided not to get the X56 here. There is a general lack of responsibility for the Freevents series that concerns me. PC World couldn't tell me what the laptop was, where to get drivers. Philips refused to accept that they made it. Twinhead in Australia told me it wasn't exactly an H12Y or H12M but something else! Also, just try getting a spare battery for the X56......

It should be pointed out that to this day, I can get updated bios, even linux drivers for a Toshiba laptop I bought back in 1999. It's not clear that one can get bios or drivers for the X56 *today*....

Bob

[.......heads for http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook/macbook.html.......]

Bob: good points, and support is something that you tend not to miss until you need it. There is a year's warranty, though, and after that period many laptop repairs cost almost as much as a replacement machine anyway.

We did have a dig around the hard drive and found separate XP drivers for all the main components, which could be copied to a backup and used for reinstallation at a later date, so that's not such a problem (as long as you make the effort to do it, of course).

The BIOS is another issue, and the existing one is rather lacking in options, though it does the job. The machine certainly looks like a Twinhead H12Y, but I wouldn't want to take the risk of flashing the BIOS and finding that it's not...

As for batteries, there are companies that will rebuild them using standard cells, for almost any laptop, but that's no good if you want to carry a spare, of course.

If you're a small business user, I might be tempted to buy two X56s and keep one in its box until something goes wrong with the main one. As others have pointed out, at the price it could still be cheaper than buying a competing product from a better known brand, or paying for a replacement mainboard, shipping, lost productivity, etc. if it broke.

Cheers,
Alex

With regards to linux - has anyone managed to get this working? I love this laptop but I couldn't live with Windows again. Does anyone know how to overcome this problem or what is causing it?

Do all linux distributions not install or is it just particular ones?

Kind regards,

David

Hiya Alex...

Any chance you could tell me exactly where these drivers are located?
Are they all in one folder as I previously thought or am I in trouble next time I come to reinstall on the PC I'm using now?!?
Also, is the SATA driver clearly marked as I may try swapping my current XP Pro on my desktop with MCE. Hoping I only need to swap licences and inform Microsoft. I'll email them later to find out.

Cheers, LD!

Thunderbolt: from memory, the drivers are in C:\Applications. That contains two folders - 'Driver' and 'Tool'. The former contains the drivers for pretty much everything, as far as we could see, although we didn't specifically look for a SATA driver. The second folder contains the installers for the pre-installed apps (Philips Media Manager, Cyberlink DVD, DivX, etc.).

All Linuxes that we tested failed to boot, even the recovery CD Linux of Partition Commander 10. But as Bob has mentioned, this does seem to be a network adapter issue, and some people have managed to get Ubuntu to work with a few tweaks. Give it a couple of months and I suspect many of the distros will work.

Cheers,
Alex

Thanks for your quick response Alex. I'll be able to hold on for a short while... until OpenSuse 10.2 is released. Ach well! In my search for info, I came across this from a person who claims to have installed Gentoo. Hope it helps someone more than it helped me lol.

Kind regards,

David

lol, forgot to include the link...

http://www.mikeditum.co.uk/showPage.php?page=24

Regards,

Another interesting link with regards to Linux...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=2461977

hi,

Does anyone else have a issue withe wireless adapter dropping the connection every now and then?

H

Can you use your Vodafone data card to get on the internet with this laptop. Cant tell if it has the slot for it!