X=(point_of_view!=NEGATIVE)?"Thank":"Damn&quo

[Maz]

My GF have a DELL laptop. She insists having Windows installed on it.
.
.
.
Well, I believe it was just a matter of time - windows crashed hopelessly at startup. Only option for me was a clean reinstall.

So I went on and formatted C. I installed XP on the machine once again - just to find out half of the pheripherials did not work - there were no proper drivers included in XP. So I turned our house upside down in order to locate the lost CD - full of drivers... It was nowhere. I decided to look the DELL's website for help. (I had no idea what the actual HW inside the machine was).

Well, I was pleasantly surprized when I noticed an ID tag at the bottom of my laptop - and driver search based on that ID at DELL's website. I hit the id in search field, and there they were. My lost drivers. (And bunch of stuff that is used in more recent versions of the laptop).

So anyways, I wish to thank the dell for their nice driver search thingee, and curse it to hell for using such non standard devices. Hell, I can only imagine the pain I would have had if I installed Linux on the machine... No list of used HW, not to mention chipsets/version numbers... And no Linux drivers... So locating working third party linux drivers would have been, well Hell as I said.

Anyways, here's a tip for you with DELL products, Download drivers for your machines from their website while they exist there - knowing windows, you might need them one day. And if this feature is no longer oin their site...........

[Zyx]

You'd be surprised how easily any recent Thinkpad or Dell Latitude boots up from Ubuntu LiveCD (been there, done that – on my work computers). It's the Windows re-install that's a problem.

My friend was hosed by that similar problem when reinstalling his Thinkpad. One of the unrecognized peripherals was hard drive, which made the installation a bit of a problem.

[Maz]

I tried Knoppix when Windows died. Full DVD version. WLAN could not be fired up, because wpa_supplicant failure. I assume the driver did not support encryption.

EDIT: And this machine is latitude D505.

I did not do any throughout checks for the system, but I could almost bet the display driver was not working correctly, nor the sound system...

[Zyx]

Ubuntu FTW. Suspend or Sleep or whatever didn't seem to work on either of my test subjects, but who cares.

I'm not sure about WPA on my Latitutde "The Lattea" 630 but at least it worked on my paperweight Thinkpad. (Ubuntu booted faster than my enterprise software loaded Windows, from a CD! Greetings to the IT dept on that one!).

But yeah, I'm amazed how it's not possible to install generic Windows on the top selling laptops without getting some drivers that are only available on the manufacturer's websites.

Surprisingly, I've never encountered this problem with my Mac...