empty_spaces
July 14th, 2008, 03:15 PM
Well, a couple of weeks back, Office Depot had a sweet Toshiba A205 S5855 notebook deal for $500 + tax for the July 4 sales :guitar: (1.83 Core 2 Duo, 15.4 ", 3GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD Writer, Built-in Webcam/Mic, Intel X3100 Graphics, 4 USB, 1FWire, S-Video, Intel PRO/Wireless 802.11 a/b/g, 5-in-1 Card Reader, Express Card Slot, Vista Home Premium).
Didn't really have to think too hard before going for it. Yeah, I know the graphics are crappy, but I'm not really into gaming and when I read that Compiz was supported by the X3100, I didn't really mind for $500+tax
1 day later, I had repartitioned the HD and was running Vista and my beloved Ubuntu.
Everything on the A205 works out of the box with Hardy - wireless, desktop effects, sound, webcam, inbuilt mic, suspend. I think sound does not work on resumption from hibernate, so I just avoid using hibernate. I can live with that.
On a side note, this was also my first experience with Vista and given my limited usage of Vista so far, it has held up better than I expected with all the Vista-bashing going on. No crashes, BSODs or errors. Although the touchpad stopped scrolling after doing some updates, that was easily corrected by rolling back the driver.
This is Vista SP1, so that may be a big improvement over the original Vista, I don't really know. Overall, I think Vista is an improvement over XP at least in terms of feel, although you do pay a big price in terms of resource usage (RAM).
I think the problems that most people have had with Vista is trying to run it on systems with RAM less than or equal to 2GB. I have done a moderate cleanup job of the Vista install on my notebook (removed a lot of the initial crapware), but it still manages to use about 1GB of RAM at startup going up to 1.5 GB of RAM after an hour of use.
Of course, that's a far cry from my Ubuntu install which takes up about 275MB of RAM with Compiz, AWN, Sensors etc. all running at startup. Ubuntu rocks !!
Didn't really have to think too hard before going for it. Yeah, I know the graphics are crappy, but I'm not really into gaming and when I read that Compiz was supported by the X3100, I didn't really mind for $500+tax
1 day later, I had repartitioned the HD and was running Vista and my beloved Ubuntu.
Everything on the A205 works out of the box with Hardy - wireless, desktop effects, sound, webcam, inbuilt mic, suspend. I think sound does not work on resumption from hibernate, so I just avoid using hibernate. I can live with that.
On a side note, this was also my first experience with Vista and given my limited usage of Vista so far, it has held up better than I expected with all the Vista-bashing going on. No crashes, BSODs or errors. Although the touchpad stopped scrolling after doing some updates, that was easily corrected by rolling back the driver.
This is Vista SP1, so that may be a big improvement over the original Vista, I don't really know. Overall, I think Vista is an improvement over XP at least in terms of feel, although you do pay a big price in terms of resource usage (RAM).
I think the problems that most people have had with Vista is trying to run it on systems with RAM less than or equal to 2GB. I have done a moderate cleanup job of the Vista install on my notebook (removed a lot of the initial crapware), but it still manages to use about 1GB of RAM at startup going up to 1.5 GB of RAM after an hour of use.
Of course, that's a far cry from my Ubuntu install which takes up about 275MB of RAM with Compiz, AWN, Sensors etc. all running at startup. Ubuntu rocks !!