Geeks.com were once more very kind to send us one of their products for a review. Geeks sells cheap laptops --among others-- and so we asked for a low-cost laptop without an operating system in it for the purpose of this review. They sent us the IBM T23, (currently selling for just $299) and an extra 256 MB stick of RAM ($30). We tested the laptop with three different OSes, read on for more.
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Member since:2005-06-28
Member since:2006-04-19
I am not a fan of Ubuntu but -damn it - you tested a BETA RELEASE (!) on the laptop!! No wonder you ran into grave bugs. Doh! If you want to write a fair article, then test the same lappy with the Windows XP Beta release and other OS's that are still developmental versions.
Two thumbs down from me.
Member since:2005-06-30
I have to agree with other users that your choice of Linux distribution could have been better. I recently tried Feisty. Since it was beta software, I wasn't terribly surprised that I had to abandon it after a few days.
I appreciate the additional perspective of Feisty provided by your review, and I can understand your desire to use a recent copy of what you consider to be the most popular distro at the moment. I also commend you for submitting bug reports, but I would have liked to read about your experience with another distro. By definition different distributions have different strengths and weaknesses. Ubuntu hardly covers all of Linux.
I understand that there are always those who whine about how their distribution should have been used because "it would have worked." Unfortunately, if you only try one distribution, readers have no way of knowing if a bug is specific to Ubuntu or if there might be a bug that would cause a problem with Linux in general. Anything that aims to be a good fit for the desktop would be good, but obviously it would help to try at least two distributions that don't share repositories. The use of just one more distribution (I don't care which one) would have made this review much better in my opinion.
Member since:2005-07-07
Eugenia, could you do me a favour and try using the Scitech SNAP driver for Linux on the T23 and see if it fares any better?
My 3yr old Athlon64 laptop has broken and I was considering buying a second hand T23 as a stopgap measure until i can afford another decent laptop.
If it causes so many problems runing Linux then I will have look for another el-cheapo alternative.
Thanks, Nik.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
The author should have tried some other distribution(s) which are know for good hardware support (SuSE, Mandriva). Linux is about choice and Ubuntu is often not the best.