This week I purchased an Acer laptop from Micro Center for $299. The model was: Aspire 5516-5474. It came with an ATI video chip set (ATI Radeon Xpress 1200), a 160 gig hard drive, an 8x DVD, an SD reader, 2 gigs of RAM, a 15.6 inch LDC Monitor (16:9 1366×768), and an AMD Athion 64 processor (the TF-20). The installed software was Microsoft Vista, home basic. I installed Ubuntu 9.04* to dual boot. It worked without any problems.

The computer case is made out of plastic, and feels light for its size. At (the time,) $299 seems like a pretty good value. This is a slow processor, however. Amazon sells the Aspire 5516-5063, which looks like the same thing except with a slightly larger hard drive, for $448, so it pays to shop around.

One issue that I did not care much about concerns the Windows Media player. I had trouble getting the sound to work. But I had no problem using the sound for Netflix and other streamed video in Vista. In Linux, the sound worked fine, but Netflix does not work for Linux, yet.

Ubuntu 9.04 recognized everything, including the screen, the wireless, the DVD player, the SD card reader, etc.

* I have only tried the 32 bit version.

July 2011 Update. To be honest, when running Vista, this laptop was really slow, and not much fun to use. Even with a regular version of Ubuntu it isn’t that quick. But I recently installed Lubuntu 11.04, and it made a world of difference. The computer actually felt pretty responsive. If you have one of these laptops, definitely try it with Lubuntu.

Here is the CPU benchmark test for TF-20 processor: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+TF-20

Some time ago, I bought a Dell m1530, with Linux Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. I have since moved on and installed a few upgrades of Ubuntu. I am currently using Ubuntu 9.04, which I like very much. But I wanted to make the machine a dual boot with Windows, so I could also do a few things that Linux can’t do yet.

Yesterday and today I spent a huge amount of time trying to understand why Windows would not see my hard drive. I assumed this was a result of the Linux boot loader changing the Master Book Record (MBR), and I spend hours trying different ways of addressing this. But that was not in fact the issue. Instead, the problem was due to the hardware settings, and specially the fact that my SATA hard drive was set to use something called AHCI mode. As described in this blog post on the topic, older versions of Windows don’t have drivers that support AHCI.

I was finally able to fix this problem by entering the Dell Bio setup, and changing my SATA setting to an ATA emulation. After making this change, Windows XP had no problem finding my Sata drive.