That Computer Won't Work 3

Posted by Ben Reubenstein Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My nephew has been saving his money to purchase a new laptop. He enjoys playing flashed based games, and is known to play RuneScape. Just recently he managed to scrap together $350.00 for the purchase. I found a laptop for exactly $350, but after closer examination found it did not include wireless. For $50 more I found a Lenovo 3000 N200 with wireless so with a little help from his Grandpa to make up the difference, we were off to the store.

Here are the specs for the box:

  • 15.4" widescreen WXGA TFT LCD display
  • Intel Celeron M 1.73GHz Processor
  • 512MB DDR2 Memory and 80GB Hard Drive
  • Windows Vista Home Basic
  • CD-RW / DVD-ROM Combo Drive
I found an employee at MicroCenter and requested to purchase the machine. He enquired if I had been told about it and I replied no, I would like to buy that machine. He informed me that it was only good for Internet and "wouldn't do pictures" since it was not very fast. I told him I was planning to ditch the Vista Home Basic for Linux. He was convinced that wouldn't work, so at that point I gave up, and told him flat out, please just get me the box. On our way out I think he told his supervisor that I was crazy, but oh well I was out the door.

Now I know this is a Windows world, so the plan is to setup a dual boot. Just starting the machine for the first time however took 20 minutes. Windows Vista had to check out the performance of the box, and slowly allow me in. Once in my nephew and I were greeted with 6 shortcuts on the desktop to products we could purchase and a ton of tiny icons already running in the task bar for various media programs and other crap.

We installed Ubuntu on the box next. This process took about 20 minutes, and it handled resizing the existing windows partition and putting the necessary GRUB entries in. It started up quickly and the only time consuming issue I had was getting the wireless card to work. After that however, we were cooking. The machine was extremely responsive compared to Windows Vista. It also included all the productivity software my nephew would need.

It is criminal that this machine is sold with Windows Vista. It is in no way capable of running it with out a significant bump in RAM. I can now understand the hesitance with which it was sold to me.