April 7th, 2010 Matt
A little while back, I wrote about the new laptop that I had bought from eBuyer.
Quick update – they found that the laptop was faulty when it arrived back and have refunded the cost of the laptop. I have raised a new customer support note because eBuyer have kept hold of the £9.99 shipping costs for sending the faulty unit out to me, which I don’t believe they should have done.
So far, it has cost £9.99 not to get a working laptop from eBuyer, so the complaint goes on.
Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle, Personal | No Comments »
March 27th, 2010 Matt
Last week, my house was broken into and one of our laptops was stolen. Not too much of a big deal, since there wasn’t much data on there (thank goodness for Cloud computing!), and once the insurance assessor visited, I went out and bought a new machine. Since this was for my wife, I left her using my Toshiba Portege M800 which runs Linux Mint 8 x64, just to see what she thought of it and whether she could move from Vista to Linux.
After a few days of it, she was mightily impressed – there are some nice features of Mint that she liked over Vista, so asked if the replacement could be one that ran Linux. No problems – might be a bit cheaper, after all! – so I hunted down a Foehn & Hirsch laptop on eBuyer.com which was cheap, and came with no OS. Here’s the detailed spec:
Processor
- Intel T3000 Celeron Dual Core Processor 1.8Ghz,
- 1MB Cache
- SIS M672 + 968 Graphics Chipset
Memory
- 4GB DDR2 667MHz
- 2 x SO DIMM
- Expandable to 4GB
Hard Drive
Optical Drive
Software
- Operating System: No Operating System
Display
- 15.6” HD TFT
- Resolution: 1366 x 768
Graphics
- SiS M672 Integrated
- Shared Memory Architecture 256MB
- High Preference 3D/2D graphic Accelerator
- Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Compatible
- Super Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0
Audio
- High Definition Audio
- Compliant With Microsoft UAA
- Direct Sound 3D
- 2 x Built in Speaker
- Built in Mic
Input Devices
- Multi Language Keyboard
- Touchpad with Scroll zone
Networking
- 56K Fax Modem
- Built in 10/100MB Base-TX Ethernet LAN
- WLAN: 802.11 b/g
Power Supply
- Full Range AC Adapter 65W
- AC in 100~240V, 50~60Hz
- DC Out 19V, 3.42A / 18.5V, 3.5A
- 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
- up to 2.5 hour battery life
Dimensions
- Width 374mm
- Depth 256mm
- Height 25~37mm
- Weight 2.7kg
Interfaces
- 3 x USB 2.0 ports
- 1 x VGA port
- 1 x Headphone port
- 1 x Microphone port
- 1 x S/PDIF output port
- 1 x RJ-11 port
- 1 x RJ45 LAN port
- 1 x DC-in jack
Expansion
- 7 in 1 Card Reader (MMC / RSMMC / SD / Mini SD / MS / MS Pro / MS Duo)
- 1 x Express Card Slot
Warranty / Miscellaneous
- 1 Year Manufacturer Warranty
- 1.3mp Webcam
That should be fine, I thought – keep her in laptops for a while, good spec and should be fine for Linux. There was nothing anywhere that I could find that said otherwise, apart from a line that said “Please note that this Laptops does not have an Operating System installed, Ebuyer recommends Genuine Microsoft Software”
Then, it arrived, and things started to go badly wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle, Personal | 6 Comments »
