Back to Windows
- Posted by Shaun on October 15th, 2007 filed in Rants, Technology
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After only a couple weeks I’ve had to make the move back to windows on my laptop. It isn’t that I didn’t like what I saw in Ubuntu, it’s that certain things just were not supported in Linux well enough for me to make the switch with this machine. Perhaps if/when we invest in a new desktop I’ll go back to Ubuntu.
The biggest problem I had was getting the video configured properly. First, the problem was that the aspect ratio was way off. I discovered an update for my video card and with that installed the aspect ratio was correct. I was able to use wide screen resolutions. The only problem was that the resolution was stuck too high. The native resolution of my laptop monitor is 1920×1200 and that was the only resolution that I could use. For two weeks I spent a lot of time online reading and trying out different hacks and configuration to no avail. Nothing worked. The problem is the video card driver, not the O/S. Oh well. The middle finger goes up to Intel for being so Linux unfriendly.
Otherwise, the o/s did great. Everything worked great out of the box, updates and installing new software was a breeze as long as you had a network connection. Even wireless wasn’t too bad once you got the hang of it. Reinstalling windows from scratch was a challenge. Far more work necessary IMHO. The installation DVDs that I got from Dell (had to request them!) reinstalled Windows, but nothing else. I had to go online to download 9 sets of drivers for every component including the NIC and video cards. After a few hours of work I’m back up to speed.
At least one good thing came of this; my windows installation is nice and clean. Seems to run a bit quicker, although, I’m trying AVG for AV and it’s a bit of a pig. Everything else runs quickly though. I hope to keep it that way. At least if I want to to a clean reinstall I’m equipped with the drivers (burned to CD) and know what I’m in for.