Geek Speak

I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion dv5, mostly out of desperation as I was not able to acquire the new Macbook I really desired. Nonetheless, I’m quite happy with my purchase and have proceeded to play around with both Vista and Ubuntu 8.10 on it. Surprisingly, Ubuntu was significantly easier to install and configure from scratch; the Broadcom Wireless card and the NVIDIA 8600M GT were both detected and drivers installed after my first login. Vista was a different story, it did come with Vista Home but it was the Russian version (as I’m living in Ukraine) so I pulled out the propoganda version that I received at QUT and spent a couple of nights trying to find all the drivers for those pesky unrecognised devices.

So far I’ve been quite happy with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with the exception of one big party-pooper: resume from suspend is broken on my dv5. Hopefully the very active user community will be able to get this resolved. But Vista doesn’t get off cleanly either. I’m really not impressed with how Vista deals with updates, it seems every second or third time I boot up I’m asked to reboot. In fact, at one point I was rudely rebooted whilst playing Call of Duty 4 on account of an update, needless to say I’ve since clipped the wings of Windows Update.