Laptop Pain
I know some people who read this blog might scoff or laugh when I say this, but it’s the nature of my beast.
Over the weekend I was trying to figure out how to dual boot a completely linux based laptop. The original hard drive that came with it was a meager 20-30GB hard drive with I think ‘Windows Vista Business.’ It was ok for the first week I used it, but soon I was looking to get 3GB ram (orig.= 1GB), a 250 GB Seagate HDD, and other stuff. I also made the switch to Ubuntu which was a great move at the time…
Then I bought a AVCHD camcorder… Now Linux will decode HD video with apparently a weird script, but it takes forever to do. Windows, with all of it’s massive evilness, decodes the raw HD video in like 10 minutes to Divx using certain programs. That’s when I wanted to dual boot..
So… I had no install disks for vista (the laptop was a cL deal), but Windows 7 RC was easy to get.. All was going well except my laptop doesn’t have a DVD player so I had to figure out a USB boot. <this took too long to get right. (Toshiba’s fault).
Second… Win. 7 isn’t packaged with SATA drivers (nice one MS dudes). I recently deduced this after trying every which way to get the installer to see the HDD. Turns out you need Raid drivers for Vista to get the win 7 installer to see your HDD (oh and the exe driver fails.. get the “real driver”)
Third… install Win 7, get a working product key (lol).
and the list could go on..
impressions
At first I like win 7’s format.. the GUI is spot on and looks nice. Things work well on it and I can decode my HD on it no prob.. However…
Right after win 7 installed.. I wiped my USB drive and plopped on a fresh distro of Kubuntu 9.04 and installed it on a new partition.
here’s the thing…
No problems detecting the HDD.. Bluetooth worked… hell even my Wacom stuff worked… all out of the box in a fresh looking awesome KDE environment.
Between KDE and Win 7.. I think that Ubuntu is far superior, more reliable, and once it catches on– could in a few years over take windows..
Unless of course MS Windows has a OMG Come to Jesus moment and turns Win 7 into pure awesomeness… heh.. lollz..
Linux ppl.. let’s get on the ball for an easy avchd converter & awesome kdenlive type video editor?
~J out