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).
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!).
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.
So far the only thing not working out of the box is the sound (not a peep so far).
Eye candy is excellent. at least on a par with vista
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.
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.
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.
I also installed “Opera” as one of my favourite browsers, and a mobile connect card suite for my dongle arriving tomorrow. Mmmmm…..wireless internet.