buying a laptop either bare or with Ubuntu

[michael miller]

About 2 mo ago I needed to upgrade my wife's laptop computer.  I saw an
Acer for just under $400 at Best Buy that looked interesting.  I'm not
an Acer fan, but at that price for a 15.5" LCD laptop with an Intel dual
core 2GHz T3200, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HD, DVD DL burner and wlan I thought it
was worth a try.  I was assured that if I installed any operating system
other than Vista, the warranty would be void.  I let it go through the
the Vista install just to make sure it worked, then partitioned the HD
and installed Ubuntu 8.04.  It's worked without a glitch so far and she
loves it.  At some point I'll delete Vista, probably after the warranty
runs out.

Mike Miller

On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 16:30 -0500, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 20:24 -0500, Nikkiana H. wrote:
> > I bought both the Studio 15 and the Mini recently and am pretty happy
> > with them.
> 
> Well the Dell Studio 15 arrived yesterday.  When I tried to boot it, the
> splash screens and text boot messages worked fine.  However, when it
> came time to draw the desktop, the screen changed to a bright background
> with colored pinstripes running vertically.  The bundled diagnostics
> (from the boot menu) pass and an external monitor shows a normal Ubuntu
> desktop.
> 
> I tried the Dell on-line chat support and was given a number for Ubuntu
> support.
> 
> This turned out to be Canonical.  The person I spoke to said he had
> heard that Dell switched LCD screens on the Studio 15 production line
> without properly testing the new screens.  Ubuntu is not working with
> those new LCD screens.
> 
> He gave me the Dell Ubuntu support phone number.  When I called, they
> said they have no fix.  I can replace my laptop as defective, but they
> do not expect the replacement to work any better.
> 
> My guess (as a software guy) as to what is going on:  Ubuntu is only
> detecting 4:3 resolutions from the video controller and the LCD screen
> only supports 16:9 (or 16:10) resolutions.  I fiddled the xorg.conf with
> no success using an external monitor.  I could only get 4:3 resolutions
> to show on the external monitor.  Attempts to force 1280x800 which is
> the documented resolution for the LCD resulted in a 640x480 screen on
> the external monitor.  None of these had any impact on the built-in LCD
> screen.
> 
> I'm returning the laptop to Dell and will buy something else.
> 
>