Giving up the laptop (rant)

Not that it wasn't that bad; ASUS A9RP, was pretty cheap for me to afford, and had the sufficient equipment and performance for my backward needs. The first thing that freaked me out was the pre-installed new and shiny Windows Vista, instead of the trusty XP. Friendly suggestion: don't use it. There are so many safety precautions that you ignore them after some time anyway, and I found myself resenting the system very quickly. Two days to be precise. It also had problems with the wireless card, but I digress.

XP, well, it has it's few (hundred?) little quirks, but you can get used to it. The stability can be also tweaked to 'decent'. But I didn't have XP at hand. :|

But I had Linux! Found a Kubuntu CD somewhere, so why don't give it a try at last? And I tried it. It worked quite fine, lacked a bit of elegance, but was very user friendly, which I liked. But then I wanted to have some features working that were apparently too special. *sigh*


One was the wireless card, since I was connecting through it to the Net by default. This didn't work quite well, as my particular type had no Linux drivers made yet. Lucky that I have other means of going on-line, I've spent a week or more browsing around looking for answers. In the process I have upgraded the Ubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10 and even to the experimental Feisty. Didn't help. Later I have tried a downgrade even, but that didn't anything either. :)

In the end I have compiled the drivers myself, solved another few problems along, and got the device working. Yeehaa! Pity the configuration for the network didn't work right; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it broke after some time. (And I have used wireless on the spot with XP for a long time without much trouble. Duh.)

But I could still tolerate that, until I wanted to actually burn DVDs with the damned thing. I think I started one DVD well, but then it came upon some mystical boundary that Linux couldn't pass, and it broke. I have ruined several DVDs without burning one successfully; meanwhile, I hit upon numerous accounts that said Linux somehow doesn't work with that burning thing. I mean, that's what users do daily, and they put on it fancy settings for security reasons, where secure means unusable? Perhaps I am too spoiled by the fast and dangerous life in Windows (and I have reinstalled some, trust me), but always watching upon the permissions and switching the whole time between root and ordinary user, oh my. Somewhere there was the problem with the burner; some group or user or whatnot had not the proper permissions, and you could just type esoteric commands from various forums in the hope some will help. Getting Linux to work without Internet would be impossible for me. Windows sucks big time, but I could always get it working... well maybe not on the first try. :)

Long story/rant short, I've gotten my hands on a WinXP CD at last, and was soon annoyed again. See, the drivers for the laptop would only work with the Service Pack, which I didn't use on my crappy old computer at home (a decent firewall was enough for me). And the Service Packs I downloaded didn't work either. Grrr.

Furthermore, after burning two or three DVDs, the ROM refused to cooperate and burn more; though maybe I was at fault for playing with drives all that time. Later, it stopped reading media completely, so there may have been a hardware problem after all... or I have just broken it. :|

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So I had enough, and decided to give up (but heroically!). I'm getting a new one, this time I've checked if it's compatible with Linux, and it appears to be.

To sum up the 'bad' from the ASUS A9RP I had:
- trouble with the wireless card and DVD-RW under both Linux and Windows. Didn't try burning under Vista
- preinstalled Vista (if you get one with XP with everything necessary, it might work well)
- the 'Function' button is on the bottom leftmost position, instead of the 'Ctrl' one... now think which one you will be using 99% of the time.
- there's also an annoying clicking sound that keeps repeating over and over (harddrive? fan? sound system???), that is working well with the other features at driving you insane. :)

The rest was quite fine, I just didn't get the features I wanted to work. And if a semi-experienced user can't then it's pretty bad.


End of rant.