I went and bought myself a laptop from Circuit City. It's an Averatec 12.1" for $899 after rebate. Pretty decent specs for the price I guess. (Pentium M 725 (1.6Ghz), 802.11b/g, 512Mb RAM, 80 gigs, DVD burner, 1" thick, 4.5 lbs) I've had some time to mess around with it, and I guess it performs roughly how I expected it to. My desktop is 2.6Ghz by comparison, and for the apps that I've run so far, there hasn't been that much of a difference. I haven't tried any games yet though. There's no graphics card on this laptop though (Intel Extreme Graphics doesn't count, not by a longshot), so I wouldn't expect it to be very beastly. I guess I also am not used to the keyboard; it's smaller than I'm used to, and my wrists hurt after awhile cuz the keys are lower down than I'm used to (so my wrists end up being bent at a different angle than I'm used to when typing).
So anyways, I guess the laptop's been treating me decently well except for one (big) mishap. So I was having the Moose (resident CS guy) help me make the laptop dual boot with Linux. So we first tried the Fedora build, but it kept giving us "kernel panic". We gave up on that and tried Mandrake; this didn't really work either. At this point, we'd already wiped the restore partition that comes stock on the laptop, in case you jack up your comp. (I could rant about how I hate restore partitions, but I'll save that for another time.) So I used a Windows XP disc that I'd bought at the Campus Computer Store. It installed and everything, but then it wouldn't boot. We tried to do it all over again, but the computer wouldn't even boot up anymore- not with windows cd, not without, not with partition magic cd, not with linux cd's, nothing. So we certifiably killed the computer while trying to install Linux. I packed everything back up in the box and took it back to Circuit City and told 'em it was giving me hardware problems, and they swapped it out for a new one, heheheh. (They asked surprisingly few questions.) This time around, I said screw the Linux. To this day, we still have no idea what the hell went wrong (Moose said maybe the BIOS was bad or something; I personally have no idea).
So anyways, I guess the laptop's been treating me decently well except for one (big) mishap. So I was having the Moose (resident CS guy) help me make the laptop dual boot with Linux. So we first tried the Fedora build, but it kept giving us "kernel panic". We gave up on that and tried Mandrake; this didn't really work either. At this point, we'd already wiped the restore partition that comes stock on the laptop, in case you jack up your comp. (I could rant about how I hate restore partitions, but I'll save that for another time.) So I used a Windows XP disc that I'd bought at the Campus Computer Store. It installed and everything, but then it wouldn't boot. We tried to do it all over again, but the computer wouldn't even boot up anymore- not with windows cd, not without, not with partition magic cd, not with linux cd's, nothing. So we certifiably killed the computer while trying to install Linux. I packed everything back up in the box and took it back to Circuit City and told 'em it was giving me hardware problems, and they swapped it out for a new one, heheheh. (They asked surprisingly few questions.) This time around, I said screw the Linux. To this day, we still have no idea what the hell went wrong (Moose said maybe the BIOS was bad or something; I personally have no idea).
posted by Dear Daniel at 9:00 PM
1 Comments:
You should have tried Suse. I have used all of those and more.. Its probably the most user friendly. It also recognized my wireless, and graphics card. Which no other did right off the back... A great book that I you should look into will also help you learn to dual boot is Linux Cook Book. I have a review of it on my site.
http://www.tsuasai.com/?q=node/186
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