lennox@alcita.com said:
> Go into the "Integrated Peripherals" section of the BIOS and set: 
> [...]

At least in some laptops, the serial lines are wired in
a strange way. (This might be related to irda support.)
My Thinkpad uses irq10 for the first serial line.

What I think might be a way for the future is to ask the
"plug and play" BIOS for the ressources used by certain
peripherals.
Unfortunately, the quality of BIOS implementations seems
to vary - there is more or less useful information, and
partly misleading data. For laptops, the gain/risk
ratio might be OK though.
I'd be curious whether your laptops report something useful
about your serial port wiring - can you try the code or
the kernel binary from my ftp server
zelof1.zel.kfa-juelich.de:/pub/NetBSD/pnpbios/?
This will dump the device nodes read from the PnP BIOS.
(The stuff is a bit outdated, but it should serve
the purpose.)

best regards
Matthias