This page consists mostly of pointers to more detailed information about what I've been doing with (and, to some extent, to) FreeBSD.
After a little more than 3 years of working with FreeBSD (after working with other (mostly multi-user) OSs, some of which resemble UNIX, since 1969), I finally bought a laptop for running FreeBSD. De-reference the immediately preceding link for additional information on the machine and what I've been doing with (and to) it.
Part of the nature of a laptop is that it is mobile, and as such, it tends to migrate from one network to another, usually doing so via the services of DHCP. However, 802.11 (wireless Ethernet) NICs tend to need a certain amount of netwrk-specific configuration-tweaking in order to be usable on a given network. Here is a page that discusses how I approached resolving that problem.
The above are three points along a continuum of tradeoffs. For quite a while, I admit that I left several of my FreeBSD systems at the 2nd of the above points -- upgrading was something that I perceived as too much pain for little gain.
Eventually, I became sufficiently uncomfortable with that approach that I found a rather different point on the continuum. Here is where I have the processes I use documented.