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My work bought me a Dell inspiron 6400 Laptop with Windows Vista Business installed on it. Lets just say that vista did not live up to my standards, and I wont get into it in this post. The laptop is a dual core intel 1.8Ghz with 1gig or RAM. When i decided to ditch Vista I didn’t have an extra XP license and did not plan on buying it either. I needed something free stable would work to VPN to work and VNC to remotely administer PCs. I chose ubuntu fiesty fawn.

The install was pretty strait forward. No weird problems. I found out my laptop has the intel945g graphics card. So I installed the 915resolution and fixed up my screen resolution. I tinkered around with my vpn client and got that to work too. Overall, with ubuntu installed, the system works great. It has taken some getting used to but open office is one hell of a suite. I can do anything I could with MS office. The system boots in little time hibernates when the lid is shut and one main difference in performance over windows vista. I went from 3 hours of battery life, moderate web browsing and light vnc work, to 6 hours in ubuntu streaming media from my server. Watching Divx movies, web surfing. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do my battery life is still better in ubuntu then windows vista. Some things to consider if you are thinking of making the switch. Not all installs go as smoothly as mine.

I have to say I have done my fair share of linux installs that have left me frustrated and wanting to give up and go and buy windows. Ubuntu just worked, and if you do have a problem there forums are wonderful they have answered pretty much any question I have had without posting just use the search option. Other things I liked was the out of box wifi support. With ubuntu all you have to do is run one command “sudo apt-get install upgrade” Will pull down all available updates and install them. You cant say that about windows. Though I have read about a command line windows tool. I will check into that. I will keep this post open and update as I see fit as I use ubuntu on a daily basis.