November 13th, 2007 by The Bosphorus
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.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Get a mac.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:14 am
Yea, what Joel said. As you can tell I don’t have a whole lot to say about computers, so, Joel seems like a very smart man……so there. :-)
November 14th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Throw a fit with Dell. We purchased a laptop and a desktop, brand new last Christmas. The desktop had problems right from the start. They make you work for it (ie: throw a fit, demand that refund) but after only one or 2 calls we had a brand new desktop delivered overnight with shipping tags (paid by Dell) to send the old one back. No real problems since.
November 14th, 2007 at 9:50 am
P.S. We hated Vista, it is nothing but trouble. Dell tech guys even confirmed that. The new computer they sent us, at my insistence, had good old Windows.
November 14th, 2007 at 10:40 am
At this point I’m not sure I want to keep the lappy. Having it in hand really brings into focus how I can use it and, as AT would say, its needful.
The lappy brings on other costs like a wireless router.
November 14th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Bos, replacing the HDD on a Dell laptop is a piece of cake. You can do it.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Yeah, but from what I’ve read about those errors its as often the memory and processor that cause em as the hard drive.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Get that money back!!
I hate it when there’s a problem with a product and they end up making YOU work to fix their mistake. Puh-leeeze!!
If you need someone to throw a fit…. I’ve been told I’m pretty good at that!!
November 14th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Bos -
Once you have installed a version on Linux on a computer, you cannot just reformat and go back to Windows. I don’t know why but it has happened to me before and I have had to take the computer into the shop to have it looked at.
Good luck.
November 14th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
I have a dell lappy dual booting xp pro and ubuntu gutsy, and it works more than fine for me. I can’t stand it when I have to boot into windows (for work).
Also, I had my cd burner go bad after about 6 months. Dell sent me a new one which I had to install myself. It took all of about five minutes. But it shouldn’t've gone bad so fast, and the new burner sucks.
As for reformatting, try gparted. It’s a linux boot disk, and you can take it back to nfts, although I don’t know if windows can just install like that. It’s not so great at stuff like that (installing).
Anyway, good luck.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Jonathan, does the amount of tinkering I mentioned sound comparable to your experience in getting Ubuntu up and running?
November 15th, 2007 at 9:13 am
No.
But I didn’t have an ATI card. In my experience, the better or worse your hardware, the more you have to tinker. But it still seems like you had a whole lot of hassle.
Did you install 7.10 or 7.04? My computer runs perfectly “out of the box” in 7.10.
November 15th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
7.10…
The ATI card seems to have given many folks problems across the board.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:37 am
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