Atomictumor

When I got the laptop out of the box, if you remember, it wouldn’t boot up Vista. After a lengthy conversation with a Dell Tech, I got Vista onto the machine and all was well.

I ran across the Linux based operating system Ubuntu while I was looking to buy the laptop. Here’s a review. Dell currently offers a line of machines with the OS right out of the box and so does this company called System76.

I was sold by Ubuntu’s ideals and I liked the open source/free nature of the beast. I wasn’t all that excited about Vista either. Given all that, I downloaded a live CD of the Ubuntu desktop and put in my lappy. The live CD was an easy, no commitment way to test drive the OS.

I liked what I saw. It worked just fine and did what I wanted. I knew from a few reviews that I was going to have to tinker to get it to run proprietary formats like mp3s and dvds. That was alright with me, so I installed the OS and fixed it so that I could dual boot both Ubuntu or Vista. I wasn’t ready to go whole hog, yet.

Ubuntu turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. I had to get it to recognize my ATI graphics card. The fancy wiz-bang effects didn’t work. I had to download fixes for those. I had to download fixes to get the fonts to render properly. The startup resolution was off which made the startup time take forever (longer than vista). Then firefox started disappearing on me. Other windows did the same. It was weird and enough is enough. I surrendered and decided to reinstall vista and thereby wipe out Ubuntu.

Ha, Ha. If only it were that simple. I put the Vista disc in the machine and cranked it up only to a blue screen. One came every time I tried.

Yesterday, AT, AKA Ladyfriend (going to have fix an autotype on that name…) came over with the boys. We ate pizza while AT tinkered with the lappy. After a few false starts he got the hard drive to reformat. We were hopeful that I could load Vista after that point, but alas it was not to be. All I got was one blue screen after another.

Now, I should say here that I don’t think Ubuntu is to blame for all my problems. I have a bad hard drive on my lappy. That’s what the third Dell Techie told me this evening. He said that the IRQL, the NFTS, the bad pool caller errors (what a great name!) all point to one thing — the hard drive. His solution was to send me a new hard drive for me to install myself. Something just doesn’t seem right about that, so I asked if that was my only option. I asked for a straight out refund. He said I’d have to talk to “Senior Management” about that. They will call me in a couple days.

Who knows what these Senior Management types will offer me, but that’s how it goes.