The Crappy LappyThis week, I found myself without a decent working loaner laptop for the first time in a long time. And I needed to head into the office. And I needed to work on the train. So, I was left with no option but to pull out my old Dell Inspiron from 2002… Yes that hideous thing you see above.

Considering that it was slower than a sloth on Sunday, I decided to give Ubuntu a good old college try as my OS of choice. I downloaded the ISO file last night, burnt it to disk this morning, and tried to install it before I left for work. That didn’t work…

So I booted up XP, worked painfully slowly on the train, got to the office and tried again. And despite how long it took, I actually got it working - and the process was relatively pain free.

I haven’t tested it out fully yet - the battery went dead by the time I was on the train home to use it – but it seems to actually be not only functional, but comparatively speedy and efficient. I’m not that surprised – I had heard good things beforehand. It’s just nice to have a decent experience with a “PC”…

The problem now is that I have another loaner, and I doubt I’ll pull out the Inspiron again any time son, even to play with Ubuntu. I mean, I can play with Windows 7 now, and that’s the more exciting of the two, right? Right?