I recently bought a Lenovo Thinkpad R61. It came preinstalled with Vista. When the laptop got to my door, Vista never even saw the light of day, I put Windows XP pro on it immediately.
There were a few problems getting Windows XP installed properly. The initial installation was seamless besides the fact that I had to put my HDD (sata) into compatability mode so the Windows installation would detect it. However, finding all of the drivers for my specific hardware on Lenovo's/IBM's site was a royal pain in the ass. First off, there are something like 5 wireless chipsets available for the R61, so finding the correct driver was a challenge. However, once I got the wireless running and the ThinkVantage software running, everything else was a snap. I just ran the ThinkVantage system update and it detected all of my hardware and installed the appropriate drivers. Then of course, I had to run Windows Update and download about a billion updates.
Once everything was updated and installed, it worked great. Going into suspend takes ~4 seconds and coming back out of suspend is equally fast. Hibernate works but is basically useless considering I can power down/up the laptop in about the same amount of time.
A few days ago, my aunt gave me an old PC that she no longer used. It's a p2 350mhz with 96mb ram and win98. Hadn't been booted since 2002. I thought I'd throw Ubuntu on it and try it out. However, the dvd drive in the machine did not read the disc I burned. Since I had already burned the disc, I booted up the Live cd on my laptop. To my surprise, almost everything worked flawlessly. My wireless worked, suspend worked (sort of), almost all of the function keys on the keyboard worked.
So I opted to install Ubuntu 7.10 and dual boot with Windows XP. The install was fairly painless; it resized my partition (this was the only point where I was worried, I was afriad it was going to nuke my Windows install) and installed with no problems. After installing, there were 0 updates to isntall, which I found to my liking (I guess 7.10 is very new?).
Once installed, I got started to configuring it to my liking. Besides installing Thunderbird and VLC, every other program I use on a regular basis was already installed: firefox, pidgin, open office. I also had heard about compiz being awesome (but had no idea what it was). So tried enabling it but it failed to work everytime I tried. After a few minutes of searching the forums, I discovered that my video chipset was blacklisted by the compiz coders due to compatability problems. I figured I'd give it a shot anyway and I manually removed my chipset from the blacklist and enabled compiz. It is awesome. After using it, I wish Win XP had some way to do the same thing.
I had problems getting VLC to play files over Samba shares but once again, a quick search on the Ubuntu forums and I had it working. The problem had something to do with VLC not being Gnome aware or some such. However, contrary to the Windows VLC, the Linux VLC won't decode WMA9 audio, which I found to be annoying.
I have an iPod nano that I haven't used in 9 months simply because I refuse to install that iTunes trash on my computer again. On a whim, I plugged it in on my laptop and it automatically deteced it. I opened the iPod with the default program and it can do what iTunes can't: painlessly allow plug and play transfer of files to my iPod. The only thing I wish the program would do is convert my .flacs to mp3 on the fly when copying them to my iPod.
I then tried the suspend function. Although going into suspend mode takes ~5 seconds longer than WinXP, it's still painless and seems to work fine. Going out of suspend is a different story; again it takes about ~5 seconds longer than WinXP. However, once out of suspend, the backlight is still off. The light is not dim and the screen is not off, the light is off and the screen is on. And after another quick search on the Ubuntu forums, I found a workaround (not a fix) for this problem as well. Hibernate works but is equally useless on Ubuntu as it is on WinXP.
In conclusion, I would have to say the experience is better than WinXP but I'm not about to replace WinXP. I have a physics lab class that provides templates in xls format that have macros that apparently don't work in OpenOffice.org. The UI is better than WinXP (with compiz enabled, on default I'd call it equal to XP). Hopefully I'll be able to phase out my WinXP usage completely as I learn more about Ubuntu.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to oblige.
There were a few problems getting Windows XP installed properly. The initial installation was seamless besides the fact that I had to put my HDD (sata) into compatability mode so the Windows installation would detect it. However, finding all of the drivers for my specific hardware on Lenovo's/IBM's site was a royal pain in the ass. First off, there are something like 5 wireless chipsets available for the R61, so finding the correct driver was a challenge. However, once I got the wireless running and the ThinkVantage software running, everything else was a snap. I just ran the ThinkVantage system update and it detected all of my hardware and installed the appropriate drivers. Then of course, I had to run Windows Update and download about a billion updates.
Once everything was updated and installed, it worked great. Going into suspend takes ~4 seconds and coming back out of suspend is equally fast. Hibernate works but is basically useless considering I can power down/up the laptop in about the same amount of time.
A few days ago, my aunt gave me an old PC that she no longer used. It's a p2 350mhz with 96mb ram and win98. Hadn't been booted since 2002. I thought I'd throw Ubuntu on it and try it out. However, the dvd drive in the machine did not read the disc I burned. Since I had already burned the disc, I booted up the Live cd on my laptop. To my surprise, almost everything worked flawlessly. My wireless worked, suspend worked (sort of), almost all of the function keys on the keyboard worked.
So I opted to install Ubuntu 7.10 and dual boot with Windows XP. The install was fairly painless; it resized my partition (this was the only point where I was worried, I was afriad it was going to nuke my Windows install) and installed with no problems. After installing, there were 0 updates to isntall, which I found to my liking (I guess 7.10 is very new?).
Once installed, I got started to configuring it to my liking. Besides installing Thunderbird and VLC, every other program I use on a regular basis was already installed: firefox, pidgin, open office. I also had heard about compiz being awesome (but had no idea what it was). So tried enabling it but it failed to work everytime I tried. After a few minutes of searching the forums, I discovered that my video chipset was blacklisted by the compiz coders due to compatability problems. I figured I'd give it a shot anyway and I manually removed my chipset from the blacklist and enabled compiz. It is awesome. After using it, I wish Win XP had some way to do the same thing.
I had problems getting VLC to play files over Samba shares but once again, a quick search on the Ubuntu forums and I had it working. The problem had something to do with VLC not being Gnome aware or some such. However, contrary to the Windows VLC, the Linux VLC won't decode WMA9 audio, which I found to be annoying.
I have an iPod nano that I haven't used in 9 months simply because I refuse to install that iTunes trash on my computer again. On a whim, I plugged it in on my laptop and it automatically deteced it. I opened the iPod with the default program and it can do what iTunes can't: painlessly allow plug and play transfer of files to my iPod. The only thing I wish the program would do is convert my .flacs to mp3 on the fly when copying them to my iPod.
I then tried the suspend function. Although going into suspend mode takes ~5 seconds longer than WinXP, it's still painless and seems to work fine. Going out of suspend is a different story; again it takes about ~5 seconds longer than WinXP. However, once out of suspend, the backlight is still off. The light is not dim and the screen is not off, the light is off and the screen is on. And after another quick search on the Ubuntu forums, I found a workaround (not a fix) for this problem as well. Hibernate works but is equally useless on Ubuntu as it is on WinXP.
In conclusion, I would have to say the experience is better than WinXP but I'm not about to replace WinXP. I have a physics lab class that provides templates in xls format that have macros that apparently don't work in OpenOffice.org. The UI is better than WinXP (with compiz enabled, on default I'd call it equal to XP). Hopefully I'll be able to phase out my WinXP usage completely as I learn more about Ubuntu.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to oblige.