Laptop rant and things to do

Jul 12

ErinBackburner, Garbage No Comments

I just bought the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo pro V7010 and the initial glee of acquiring it is getting eroded by some frustrations i have with it.

good points:

  • it has built-in wireless card. i dont have any use for it and its going to be an energy guzzler but the one on the site does not have it on their specs.
  • windows installer has an english option (i thought it will be purely Finnish, and that would make working with windows more painful).

bad experiences:

  • repartitioning the harddrive to prepare it for dual booting was painful. the customized recovery disc insisted on having a 40GB-10GB scheme, and its a 60GB HDD!!! I dont know what happened but it got reversed during my successive attempts.
  • I got re-acquainted with windows installation. it never ceases to amaze me that until now microsoft has not yet perfected the art of showing the ETC. i had to stare at the installation screens for two hours for something that was supposed to take only 57 minutes. and when did 17 come after 33 (when you are counting down backwards)?
  • since I use the laptop mostly for my masteral requirements, having the laptop constantly plugged was workable. but when i tried playing a couple of 3d games (worms3d and neverwinternights), the whole thing locks up and a hard reset is needed.
  • MdvLE2005 is installed now but for the life of me it cannot connect to the internet. The Internet service that I got is a DHCP type service and everything works in WinXP but I cant figure out why Mandriva cant get a usable IP address. I know it can connect to the server because when I enabled ‘replace hostanme from server’ (or something like that), my laptop’s hostname changes everytime i boot.
  • cpu throttling does not work in WinXP (it might be WinXP’s fault). cpufreqd fails to start in Mandriva.

Well that pretty much covers my 1 week usage of the laptop. My spare time is severely sparse, but here are the things to do…

  • make internet work in mandriva (or else install a different distro)
    -> use dhcp-client to get new IP address
  • disable wireless both in windows and in linux (no need currently as it just drains battery at this point)
  • test NeverWinter Nights in Linux. if its still faulty, contact Fujitsu.

The 3d graphics card issue is the main killer here. What is the sense of having a graphics accelerator card in a system if it will cause the system to halt if used? This is not the ‘German’ engineering that I was expecting…

[updates]
– the problem is that the games are using too much memory than what is allocated to the card (32MB). I maxed it to 128MB and the game went on smoothly. Even 64MB works. 🙂

– dhcp-client did the trick of getting an ip address _everytime_.

Posting now from MDVLE2005. wooohoooo…

no updates on the other items though…

ciao!

Leave a Reply