RSS 
So in September, my laptop Nika died of an electrical system failure. Going through a semester of university without a laptop was a hassle, but I waited and on Boxing Day I picked up a new laptop for $600 CDN ($300 off!). So what does one get for about the cheapest laptop in the store? Well, I got an Acer Extensa 5620 equipped with a Core2 Due 1.6GHz cpu, a pleasing 2 GB ram and a 250GB harddrive. It also had a Intel X3100 video card. So really, I couldn't have asked for any more in laptop. I'm pretty pleased. I named it Umbriel.
Then I threw Ubuntu 7.10 on it.
First, a few install details. I decided to save Vista since a) I paid for it and more importantly b) I might need it for Starcraft 2. Vista did at least come with a nice partition+filesystem resize tool that shrank it right down. So that was nice. And then Ubuntu installed smoothly onto the rest of the disk and setup Grub to dual boot them flawlessly. So that was all nice.
So what are the good and bads?
The goods: All the open source Intel hardware I could want, including a surprisingly good built in web cam. The Ubuntu install went without a hitch and everything worked. Popped in media and it went out in search of codecs and installed them. Cool.
The medium: I did have to manually install DVD support. But it took like 1 minute so whatever. Same for enabling CPU scaling control from the Gnome panel applet (and I understand the rational for that).
The bad: Even though the graphics drivers for the newest Intel video card are open source and Intel backed no less, I can't have desktop bling AND video playback. One or the other. That's kind of lame. But will probably be fixed, and I'm really hoping by the time Ubuntu 8.04 comes out.
More annoyingly, the sound situtation. The speakers are way to quiet in some situations, like playing a DVD and only acceptably loud other times. Ditto for the headphones. The only minor saving grace is that this is also the case in Windows Vista which the laptop came with. That the computer industry as a whole is shipping laptops with crippled gimpy sound like this is a little discouraging and amazing. Does no one test the hardware and software they ship? Max sound on both headphones and speakers should be better than a whisper. Also, some weird regression in Ubuntu in that when I plug headphones in the speakers don't turn off. Awesome. I though we had that licked like YEARS ago. It worked on my old laptop :p
Still, as a work and school machine the laptop is wonderful and more than sufficient. Additionally it can smoothly play UT2004 with all the features turned to low (which is really a a nice bonus) and I'm hopeful that with in a year it'll handle video and audio just fine. And lets face it, $600 is pretty damn cheap :)
