Well, it finally came time that the old Compaq 3120 was starting to show its age. It still runs OK but after having continuous issues with the power coming unplugged, and the fact it is 6 or 7 years old, it was time for an upgrade. It will continue service with my daughter until it finally gives up….. whenever that should be.
The laptop market is pretty full to say the least. I also am not really up on the latest and greatest processors which further confused me. The way I looked at it, I was using a 6 year old machine so whatever I got was going to be an upgrade. I went looking with a $500.00 budget too, which further whittled down the field. Once I got it narrowed down to the price point, it then was bang for buck as far as processor, ram, HD, etc. and then finally Linux compatibility.
The final result was the Lenovo G550 .
I really liked the specs of this machine for the price. There were few out there that had 4G of RAM and a 320G HD for the $500.00 price range. I also really liked that it has the Lenovo / IBM history of being Linux compatible. I don’t believe that it carries an official “Linux Certified” assurance, but the fact that you can buy a higher end Lenovo product that is certified says a lot about the company and it’s attitude toward Linux. This model also got a favourable view on LinLap with most if not all hardware being recognized and working out of the box. It also has a built-in web cam which is something I have never used before. Mine came with Vista installed but that lasted about 5 minutes. I even blew away the recovery partition as it won’t ever be needed in this house.
My operating system of choice is Ubuntu , in this case the latest version 9.10 named Karmic Koala. The install went extremely smooth, as most modern Linux distros do nowadays. The only hardware that wasn’t recognized was the wireless interface. I am pretty used to this from years of having to fight with hardware not being recognized. In this case, after rebooting from the install, the hardware manager offered up the “closed source” driver for the wireless and away it went. To my surprise (and I guess not really since I said that Lenovo had good support) the web cam worked without any messing around. Not having any experience with the web cams I didn’t know what to expect.
Finally, the one item that NEVER SEEMED TO WORK for me, EVER was suspend to ram. The old Compaq never would recover after being suspended. I suspect it was because of the Nvidia video card. It has a closed source driver but even using the “nv” driver that comes with most Linux distros it never did work. I can happily report that suspend to RAM does work on the G550. I don’t know why it does work but it sure is nice to be able to use your laptop like, well, a laptop.
So overall the G550 gets a glowing review from me. It just worked, right out of the box. Also the price was right for me. If you are looking for a well built laptop that will run Linux, look no further.
