Toshiba Satellite A210 (701)
CPU
The A210 exhibits a dual-core Turion 64 X2 TL-62 running at 2100 MHz (200 x 10.5) and with a 512KB L2 cache for each core. For traditional processors, the multiplier is the value multiplied by the speed of the FSB to get the clock speed of the processor. Turion processors have a memory controller integrated on the CPU die, replacing the traditional concept of FSB. The multiplier here applies to the 200MHz system clock frequency, not the HyperTransport speed which is 800MHz.
Video Card
There's a dedicated utility for configuring the fglrx ATI driver called aticonfig. I was able to configure the card to accept the dual heads with the following command which generated an appropriate xorg.conf file.
aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=above
To run a single monitor, use
aticonfig --dtop=clone
Webcam
lsusb shows the webcam to be a Chicony. Some of the webcam programs are unable to communicate with it, but skype show that it's working fine. Xawtv and Cheese also work with it. Cheese is the better one as it integrates more nicely with GNOME.
USB Problem
I'm having major problems with USB. If a few devices are connected then after some minutes all of them will stop working (this is even without using a hub and just connecting to all available usb ports on the laptop). After they've stopped, the system will shutdown during bootup spontaneously (and not at exactly the same point during bootup) until all devices are removed (even monitor and LAN will need to be removed sometimes before it will boot). So far it has always succeeded in booting when there's nothing plugged in except power.
I don't know yet whether this is a hardware problem or a linux problem. First I'd like to see if Sven's behaves the same way in my set up. If not I'll have to reinstall it with vista and test it again then return the unit if still failing.
I'm now back on the old A10 lappie and nuking the A210 back to factory default system so I can test the USB's thoroughly. The last straw was when I tried to watch a movie and it was not able to render it smoothly, and about 5 minutes into it rebooted. I tried installing with an older version of Ubuntu 7.1 but it locked up during installation.
Benchmark
I haven't found a good simple program to give a simple whetstone result for the CPU(s) yet. But as a basic benchmark comparison I did a two-pass rip of a DVD vob to a 1GB xvid file using dvd::rip. It took a bout 5.5 hours on the A10 (2200MHz Celery with 400MHz FSB), and about two hours on the A210, which made it just under 3 times the speed. However, I didn't realise at the time that you need to set it to cluster-processing to use both cores, so actually it's about 5.5 times faster.
Windows Vista
I've had to reinstall the machine to factory defaults again by booting the recovery DVD's made after first boot. The discs don't contain any user information, the put it back to exactly the same state that it comes out of the box running an installer on first boot.
I've been extensively testing USB devices and they seem to be working without any problem (it's difficult to tell because vista is so unstable that it's intefering with my observations!).
