Matt Daubneys Blog

A couple of weeks ago now I bought myself a new laptop. My poor Dell had been battered too much and was finally giving in to it’s poor treatment. Dead pixels, missing keys, noisy fans, it just had to be put out of it’s misery. So now I have a shiny new Packard Bell.

I’d actually been in the market for a Thinkpad, based on their reputation of being practically indestructible. I soon chaged my mind after being promised deliveries that never arrived by a few online retailers. I ended up going to PC World, pretty much ignoring the sales staff and wandering around with my Pre checking compatibility and pricing on the interwebs. I’ve been a bit skeptical of the build quality of Packard Bell for a little while, but this seems quite a solid machine. Time will tell whether it remains that way or so I must admit, but one can hope!

Spec wise, the machine is a 2.2GHz Core2Duo (T6600), it comes with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD and an nvidia Geforce G210M card with 512MB of dedicated graphics memory. It’s got a broadcom wireless chipset (b/g/n) and a gigabit ethernet port. All of this works out of the box with Ubuntu bar one. The driver for the NVIDIA card has a nasty bug. It doesn’t seem to detect the EDID information correctly for the monitor, so some hackery is required in the xorg.conf to prevent you getting 6 miniscreens instead of 1, or for getting a horribly fuzzy screen. Nvidia has recognised this bug, so hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. The open source nv driver doesn’t have this bug, but you lose a lot of the shiny 3d effects and so on, which is a bit of a downside.

The webcam in he lid also works out of the box.

All in all, it seems quite an able machine, but time will tell if I made the right decision or not!