Wall of Mouths

I would much rather use Linux but I daren’t try and install it.

It comes pre-installed on the laptop.
I found a youtube video earlier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxfSwzhSn1c) but I wasn’t sure if this was a modded version to the standard one. It looks very swish..

The laptop I was thinking of getting was:
(http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk& … &s=dhs) for £280
it’s stats are:
BASE Intel ® Atom™ Processor N270 (1.60GHz, 533MHz, 512K cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM Ubuntu 8.04
HARDWARE SUPPORT 1Yr Limited Warranty - Collect & Return
WEBCAM Web Camera NOT included
COLOUR CHOICE Black
LCD 8.9” WSVGA (WLED) Truelife Display
MEMORY 1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
HARD DRIVE 8GB Solid State Hard Drive
GRAPHICS CARD Integrated Intel® Graphic Media Accelerator 500
WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY Dell 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Mini-Card
PRIMARY BATTERY 4-cell Lithium-Ion Battery (32 WHr)

Or I can get (http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/484318/ACER-AOA150-BB/tab/advice) for £280 and it’s stats are:
Brand ACER
Screen size 8.9 inches
Processor Intel Atom
Processor model number N270
Processor speed 1.60
Processor bus 533
Processor cache 512 kB
Memory (RAM) 1024 MB
Storage (hard drive) 120 GB

So they’re almost exactly the same apart from the Ubuntu comes with a MUCH smaller but Solid State hard drive (I don’t need much space though since it’s just word processing) but I might bump it up to a 16gig for a little extra. I’m basically wondering if it’s worth getting Ubuntu if the other is the same price, larger hard drive and an OS I recognise.

Ok, sometimes I am a right numpty: I opened this topic because I thought the title would refer to some heavy metal band…

Any information on Ubuntu though, Charlie?

Viirkokka wrote:

So they’re almost exactly the same apart from the Ubuntu comes with a MUCH smaller but Solid State hard drive (I don’t need much space though since it’s just word processing) but I might bump it up to a 16gig for a little extra. I’m basically wondering if it’s worth getting Ubuntu if the other is the same price, larger hard drive and an OS I recognise.

I’d go with the Acer - you may not need all that disk space, but at this moment I’d choose a harddisk over solid state (or any sort of flash memory). The price per GB is significantly lower, and flash based solid state disks suffer from limited write cycles (which is even worse when using multi-level cells as opposed to single-level cells), and repeated writes to the same area of the disk (such as a swap file) will wear that area out quite quickly. To fix such problems flash based systems incorporate something called wear levelling but that simply delays the inevitable.

And since Ubuntu is free you can always ditch whatever OS the Acer comes with and simply download and install Ubuntu instead.

Im tempted to do a dual boot and use ubuntu for video editing, beats windows crashing every 5 seconds.

I haven’t minded using Vista actually…it’s hardly crashed at all in a year

Viirkokka wrote:

mm.. I always wonder what people are doing to their pc’s to be complaining that it crashes so much.

Rendering huge video files for a start, I mean i have 2 gig of ram and a 3.0 ghz pentium 4 cpu yet i still get lots of shit from windows.

not when you can only use pc3200 ram which costs a bomb nowadays.