Jeni's Musings

Hi,

A few months ago, I bought a Dell inspiron 9400. It came with Vista, but I replaced it completely with Kubuntu (7.04 at that time, now at 7.10). It has eye candy via Compiz (the rotating cubes, and all that) and I love it. It feels very speedy for what I need (which includes XSLT transformations and fair few other apps often running at the same time).

The wireless has been great. With Compiz running the standby doesn’t work which is a bit annoying, but fortunately the way I use it, if I am done I just shutdown (which is quick, as is startup).

The screen is a huge 17” (1900x1200 resolution) which is all detected by kubuntu. But that screen size means battery (even with a 9-cell) is limited — about 2.5 hours — certainly not a portable! The advertised battery time for Vista on this was about 5 hours, but some people said in reviews that they realistically got 3 hours.

And all this for about £1000 or so, if I remember right!

For Office, I have usually sufficed with Open Office. Where I have needed to, I have VMWare with XP. Microsoft also provide a time-bombed XP image for testing versions of IE which can be handy if you don’t have a license of XP somewhere. Othertimes I remote desktop to my old XP machine which has an older version of Office. Either way no problems.

Hope that helps!