Feeling rather chuffed today, having upgraded my laptop. It's a bottom of the range Dell Inspiron 1300. That said, it's an OK piece of kit - although perhaps a little bulky for really portable use.

Anyway, it came with 256MB of RAM. I turned down the salesman's insistence that I include more for about 30 quid because I knew I'd be running FreeBSD rather than Windows. Still, more memory always comes in handy.

After umming and ahhing about the memory on Ebuyer (would it be the right speed, would there be strange compatibility problems) I though of checking the Crucial website. I input my system details and it presented a number of compatible memory options. I chose the cheapest 512MB option, and got it with free delivery for half the price of the memory on Ebuyer. Installed and working without difficulty.

Encouraged, I then went looking for wireless cards. Again, I didn't include this when I ordered the machine from Dell because it was expensive, and probably Broadcom and therefore not supported by FreeBSD. Looking around, I found an Intel 2200bg chipset mini-pci card on Ebay for £15 which was stated as working on the Inspiron 1300. Installed that last night and was up and running in literally 5 minutes.

As an aside, it just goes to show that Unix isn't always as difficult for this stuff as it's cracked up to be. I had previously used a USB wireless device under the ural driver. My new mini-pci card is covered by the iwi driver. All I had to do to get it working was read the iwi man page and copy 6 lines into /boot/loader.conf (see the man page for details) and change the line in /etc/rc.conf which read "ifconfig_ural0" to read "ifconfig_iwi0". Everything just worked. I'm dreading having to install the drivers on the Windows XP partition, it'll be much harder. The moral of the story is, when looking for hardware to run on FreeBSD, make sure you buy something that's supported.

So all in all, an easy upgrade. In fact working inside the laptop was easier than working in many desktops (and particularly the small form factor ones I'm trying to turn into FreeNAS boxes - but that's another story)