I believe on occasion when talking about the laptop I acquired about 5 months ago i've mentioned the occasional clicking and sometimes beeping from the hard drive. I eventually found a thread about this on a forum but like so many threads on a tech topic, it bottomed out before reaching a conclusion. It was something to do with acoustic noise suppression - quieting the drive down for slight performance loss.
Apparently the clicking is a symptom of a bad drive handling this technology, or at least thats as close to an explanation as I could get from Dell. They wouldn't acknowledge it was damaging the drive as it went, but I dunno - those clicks sounded pretty detrimental to me, and somebody else in the said thread did say that it was degrading their drive statistically.
Anyways, I left home to get a haircut mid-afternoon Saturday leaving the laptop switched on, sitting on the bed. When I returned home I saw Vista was reloading itself - you know - the nearly blank screen with the green progress bar (home edition - it might be blue in the version with the wavy grass - I dunno). I just figured MS might have installed some updates then rebooted after a countdown, which i've moaned about before. Five minutes later nothing had changed.
Long story less long, various methods of booting all failed eventually leading me to run the Dell Diagnostics in the BIOS. What we identified were at least 4 bad blocks. This in 8 digit hex code form was enough to convince Dell that it was time to ship me a new drive, which I will have to take another day off work to receive.
The dying drive is a Samsung 320GB model. The replacement will be a Western Digital. I'm very glad about this.
Lifetime drive experience to date:
Quantum - Fail 1
Samsung - Fail 1
Western Digital - Fail 0
Thanks, at least, to to the sheer beauty of compatibility between all SATA drive sizes, I have been able to dangle the tiny laptop drive from a wire in my old desktop and grab the few files of value on the drive, which hasn't yet fallen completely, but obviously will before too long. It's badly enough damaged that it stops XP on that unit booting when connected, but not badly enough that Ubuntu can't handle it.
Which brings me to the beauty of Ubuntu. I am sitting in the seat I normally sit in, on the laptop I normally write on. On the front left of that laptop is a gaping hole where a hard drive should be. Only thanks to Ubuntu is this remotely possible, via the "try before you install" bootable CD based version of the OS.
Ubuntu is a pain in the arse for many things:
- Input. Keyboard can be a nightmare. During this post I have on several occasions ended up with unresponsive keys, shifting focus and strings of one character speeding off to the right, and I know there's nothing wrong with the keyboard itself.
- Input. My trackpad simply doesn't work under Hardy. The pointer flies all over the place registering clicks that simply aren't happening. It worked fine this morning under an older Gutsy CD - now i'm forced to plug in a USB mouse, which works fine. If I wanted to keep using Hardy on this machine, it would be a nightmare.
- GNOME. It's clunky as hell. It's very impressive for free, but the Linux community's long standing inability to accept that open source alone does not solve all problems is.... well, still standing.
- Ease of Configuration. Ubuntu is the most user configurable distribution I've ever used. That said, my previous experiences were the vanilla Debian and Slackware, both of which are known to be less friendly. Nonetheless, if Ubuntu is to become what it by rights should become, it needs to achieve the ease of use of a Mac/Windows, and I said Mac first not because I know much about them, just based on testimony, and the fact that fanboys would scoff that I consider Windows easy to use if I didn't also mention the Mac.
On Vista, which I was using yesterday before the crash I plug in an HDMI cable and instantly have an extended desktop. On Ubuntu, plugging the cable in does nothing. Through a hard to understand panel I manage to get the TV to show the same screen, but extending the desktop - no idea.
On Vista I HATED the fact that most applications didn't let me switch between sound outputs. Most use the default, so we resort to switching the default in the Control Panel. This to me has always seemed terrible, however I created a shortcut to it in the quick launch and now it happens quickly when I want to redirect sound to my TV via HDMI. On Ubuntu I simply can't figure out how to begin doing this, so I don't think i'll be performing my normal ritual of watching TV through the laptop tonight.
Conclusion - Linux is ready to do pretty much everything anybody needs it to, but not without sound understanding. Vista and Leopard both stand tall above Ubuntu. When I bought my laptop I intended to switch it to Ubuntu after trialing Vista for a few days. I only now finally see how much I lose if I try to make do with Ubuntu. When my new drive arrives I will dutifully reinstall Vista.
John C Dvorak often trots out the idea that Linux on the desktop might take off if Adobe released a version of Photoshop for it, but as things stand, it's hard to see how they could build it to work fluidly enough in this nightmare interface. Certainly GIMP is no fun to use. His other idea that Google might buy Ubuntu and create Google Linux... Perhaps, if they threw some interface expertise at it, that might be a good thing. Rebadging this product though, wouldn't get anyone anywhere.
Ubuntu great for letting me use my laptop without a hard drive - really great, but the interface and configurability suck more than I remembered.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Your troubles with ubuntu are minor, easily solved by asking the right question in the right place. Ubuntu doesn't automatically do some things because it is capable of doing so much more. It will let you define your video however you want, for however many monitors you can plug into it. You can have your diplay duplicate on extra monitors, or you can have it be a totally different display; you can even set it up like a kiosk system, and have your extra monitor set up as a seperate workstation, with its own keyboard and mouse. I recently set up a laptop for a friend, and yeah, it was a bitch, but now he can watch his tv through his video out while he and his girlfriend are both using the internet, him on his laptop, and her on another worstation I set up using the external monitor port and a usb keyboard and mouse. I also set it up so he can use his tvs universal remote to control it all, so he can change channels just like he used to, and other things, like check his email. Next thing we are planning is to add some wii controllers, so that the tv can be used for gaming as well. Total time so far is about six hours. So if you want to stick with Vista, go right ahead, but don't diss Ubuntu/linux just because you can't figure it out. Its a way way way better OS than MS could ever hope to be, and its free, made mostly by hackers and slackers just like me.
Can't say I dispute much you've said here. Linux as a whole doesn't choose to sacrifice flexibility for not so much ease of use, but ease of configuration, and this is exactly why so much usefulness is squeezed out of it. What you describe sounds very impressive.
Normally I do manage to find the answer to a question, but during a weekend where i'm using a live disc and a driveless laptop, advanced configuration wasn't something I particularly wanted to get into, knowing i'd be losing everything next reboot. I was merely pointing out that it would have been nice to see it recognise an HDMI device connected in the same way it recognises VGA, DVI, networks, sound cards and so on.
There's nothing wrong with "dissing" something in the hope that it improves. Knowing what is most important to the user experience is how the desktop version of Ubuntu will keep improving. Well meaning contributors with a developer mindset choosing to ignore real user opinions is less likely to do that.
All these recent Netbook customisations seem likely to help in this area too, as they have to concentrate on the user experience by design. They can afford to ignore the huge base of potential the platform has, but that doesn't mean it can't feed back into that wider base.
I'll always appreciate the people that work on Linux, but if you are such a person, I hope there are also plenty of others who see things in a variety of ways, because i'd like to see the OS become more of a competitor to Windows/MacOS for the less advanced user. I'd like to recommend it to friends/family without necessarily appointing myself the guy that's going to make it work and keep it working.
Post a Comment