Well PC World’s loss is Dell’s gain – my new Inspiron 1525 laptop arrived today, complete with ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed, and a battery pre-charged. It recognised my new logitech marble mouse (been wanting to try one of these for a while – thought it would be good on a small desk or even a knee). It also recognised a USB pen-drive, and a USB hard disk, even though this was formatted as NTFS. I copied all 30GB of data off the disk while typing this (took several minutes at around 15mb\/s according to the file copying utility).<\/p>\n
All in all, a fantastic machine which has all the bits and pieces I need, together with access to more utilities than I will ever get to use ( and a few games!).<\/p>\n
First charge of the batttery lasted about 2 hours intensive use, including powering the external hard disk. This is the 9 cell version with a power bulge at the back. Normally comes with 6 cells.<\/p>\n
So far the only thing not working out of the box is the sound (not a peep so far).<\/p>\n
Eye candy is excellent. at least on a par with vista<\/p>\n
Keyboard is quite good, apart from my tendency to keep hitting the touchpad, due to my not normally typing on this sort of keyboard a lot. Might have to put something over it and use the external mouse all the time.<\/p>\n
I had cause to play with a vista machine today, which seemed to spend every spare minute running both available processors flat out doing some background task. It also took around 4 hours to copy about 20GB off an external hard disk (USB). Pretty poor performance by comparison to ubuntu – good job I was near a mains point. Not my machine of course, and cost rather more.<\/p>\n
Put a few desktop widgets (desklets) on, and had a play with “F-Spot” photo album\/editing suite. Imported from disk flawlessly, and does a great slide show.<\/p>\n
I also installed “Opera” as one of my favourite browsers, and a mobile connect card suite for my dongle arriving tomorrow. Mmmmm…..wireless internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well PC World’s loss is Dell’s gain – my new Inspiron 1525 laptop arrived today, complete with ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed, and a battery pre-charged. It recognised my new logitech marble mouse (been wanting to try one of these for a while – thought it would be good on a small desk or even a knee). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nthong.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}