On 13/05/11 10:57, Richard Smith wrote:
I am thinking of buying a xenon 14" laptop from pcspecialist, can anyone
see any major problems with ubuntu on it.
http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/xenon/
The Xenon has the Sandy Bridge laptop processor/chipset. Ubuntu 11.04
has Sandy Bridge support. I'm not sure about previous releases, but I
would expect getting them to work might involve using a PPA or two.
Removing the OS does reduce the price by the cost of the OS. That is
rather rare to see - even Dell Ubuntu machines don't tend to manage that.
I would point out that it has a glossy screen (which I'm not a fan of,
but can live with) and the photos suggest the keyboard has a single
height return key (my personal keyboard pet hate - but many Acer laptop
photos have that whereas the UK spec machines have the proper double
height return key). In fact, the photos are of a machine with a US keyboard.
The graphics won't win any prizes either, but should be OK.
Another thing which annoys me about Intel laptops is the need to
research the processor in detail to ensure it supports the features I
need - that just isn't an issue with AMD laptops, as they don't remove
features for marketing purposes. At least with this laptop you have a
choice of processors. I just wish the AMD ones had better battery life.
It doesn't mention eSATA or USB 3 in the specs, and it isn't clear to me
if it has an ExpressCard slot. If it has none of those, that is going to
make it awkward to connect fast external devices.
Those are the only criticisms I would have from looking at the web page.
The only things which would to stop me adding this to my list of
possibilities for my next laptop are the US keyboard and the ExpressCard
slot, and both of those are things which the suppliers may be able to
confirm are not problems anyway. Other than that, it looks like a rather
nice laptop for a pretty good price without Windows. I'd be interested
to know more about it if you get one.
--
JimP
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