Matt Daubneys Blog

To replicate a new users experience, I thought I’d start by restoring my laptop back to just having Windows 7, as factory default. Since Ubuntu takes about 10 minutes to install this should be easy, turns out this was a bit of a mistake.

Modern computers don’t tend to come with any recovery media, just a partition on the HDD to recover your system if it’s broken. Mine had a Utility to create some DVD’s to replicate this if there was an issue with the drive itself. Now the recovery partition on my laptop is apparently corrupt So I dug out my DVD’s I created when I received the machine, popped disk one into the drive to find that the DVD had perished sitting in the drawer for 14 months or so. “No worries!” thought I, Packard Bell support should be able to ship me some recovery media!

A 20 minute phone call later (at 10p a minute) and they offer to ship me the recovery media for the bargain basement price of just £51.16. Considering I could buy a new copy of Windows for £60 I wasn’t impressed at all and promptly told them so. After failing to justify the charge for software I already own, I gave up. About to consider the whole thing a waste of time, someone offered to loan me a Windows 7 OEM install DVD that I could just type my serial number into. The serial number would be on the sticker on the laptop, “Huzzah!” I thought.

But no, the sticker has in fact worn to the point it’s unreadable. Now completely stuck, I went to bed with the thought of giving up on the whole thing. If I was an average user I’d either have been stiffed for a charge of £51.16 now, given up and bought a new laptop, or just given up completely.

As I slept I had a dream…. many moons ago, when I created the recovery DVDs I vaguely remembered making ISO files of each one. Rummaging through my assorted boxes/drawers of old computer kit I found my old external hard drive (without the case, which had failed). Popped it into a USB SATA dock and found the ISO files. How a non-technical user is supposed to get through all this rubbish I have no idea.

DVD’s burnt, I popped them into the laptop. An hour and 2 dvd changes later, the system reboots to a “Starting Windows” screen, then reboots again. Another windows loading screen with “Preparing your system for first use” appears, then “Setup is checking video performance”. Then, a miracle happens! Something actually worked and I can setup a username, password, timezone, security settings and network. Windows goes away for a bit to “Finalize settings” , pops to a welcome splash with a symbol of a clock and “2 min” underneath it. 3 minutes later I’m presented with the chance to register my laptop (which I decline) and the chance to activate my free 60 day trial of Norton antivirus (which I decline). Then I have a desktop!

Since I told Windows to download important updates it goes away and does so immediately after the preinstalled rubbish passes. While it’s doing that I promptly remove Norton and start removing the preinstalled rubbish that Packard Bell decided to bundle with the machine. After loading the control panel, I’m immediately interrupted by “Launch Manager” installing something…. Apparently this is PB preloading more rubbish I probably don’t want or need. Best to wait for that to finish I think. Oop, and thats decided to reboot the machine for me. Good thing I did wait in the end. After that reboot, I set about removing all the packard bell rubbish, and Norton Antivirus. About half an hours work there to get it all off the machine, and in that time Windows has downloaded yet more updates. A reboot to install those and clear out the last of the preinstalled gumpf, and I have a clean Windows 7 install! Check the windows update status, 82 more updates to install. Button clicked, sit and wait. Another reboot, and I get a box asking me to choose my browser. I ask it for firefox and it goes away and downloads the setup program. I install firefox, just clicking next, then browse through to get AVG (the free virus scanner). Download and install and windows pops up telling me more updates are ready to install. Install those, reboot again, and I appear to have hit the last of them! Finally!

Now! All of my documents are in ODF format, so a quick trip to the Libre Office website and …. the machine hangs. HDD spinning, but UI unresponsive. Shall leave it a little while to see what happens. Oop, it reboots and tells me it’s not shut down normally. Let it boot backup normally and try again! It appears it was installing new updates again. Let it update and rebooted again. Install LibreOffice.

This time all is successful, and I have what I consider to be a useful desktop machine! Now to just use this now and see how things go.

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!