I have been using a Dell Vostro 1000 laptop lately. The operating system I am using is FreeBSD 7.0 Release for AMD64. Here is some relevant information:

The sound driver is snd_hda.
LCD brightness can be controlled by the hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness sysctl. For that to work, you need to insert the acpi_video module.
For Xorg to work well, you need to use the ati driver, at least version 6.9.0. So pkg_add -r xorg to get the basic Xorg stuff, and then build x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati in ports. You will need to make deinstall before you make install, because the old ati driver is installed by default. Here is my xorg.conf.

The performance of the Vostro 1000 is slightly worse than an IBM T42 from a few years ago. The IBM T42 is slightly slower than one core of a 2GHz Intel-based MacBook. The built-in SATA disk and the associated I/O subsystem gives about 55MB/sec on large sequential uncached reads at the outside of the disk, and 28MB/sec at the inside.