benja22

I ordered a laptop computer from Dell yesterday. It’s expected to ship on March 6th.

I know, I know. After my last Dell ordering fiasco, you would think I would never go through that again. The word on the street is that those problems were because Dell had a lousy paint shop at the time and couldn’t keep up. School was just starting and they couldn’t get the pinks and reds to look right.

So, I decided to give Dell another chance.  This time I ordered it in Henry Ford’s favorite color; black. You can’t go wrong with the default.

One of the biggest reasons I chose to go with Dell is that I don’t use Microsoft operating systems. So, anytime I buy a computer with Vista or XP pre-installed, I feel like I’m paying a tax to Microsoft for a service I will never use. Dell offers computers with Ubuntu Linux installed. There are other companies that put linux on laptops but they are usually high end, thousand dollar computers or low end, seven inch screen computers with wind up cranks. The one I ordered, the Dell Inspiron 1525 N, is on the low end of half way between those.

I would prefer to not have anything installed. The free Ubuntu installation will be removed and replaced with my GNU/linux choice, Mandriva. It’s nice to know that all the hardware that require drivers will work under linux though.

Another reason for choosing the Dell was the price. It’s a low end box, but everything in it was “good enough”. The worst thing on it is the graphics card, or, more precisely, the shared memory for the card. This is not a gaming computer.

I’ll be reviewing this laptop here in the next few weeks. I have not been able to find a review of it with any other operating system beside Ubuntu Linux. That’s not counting all the reviews with XP and Vista of course. There are plenty of those.