More precisely, I swapped my nice ASUS 3500L for the same brand’s X51RL. I was tempted by a gigabyte of RAM, a SATA hard drive at 5400 RPM, a glossy widescreen display. And the ATI graphics with Wi-Fi won’t hurt either.
The first discovery was the quirky driver situation for this model. I already knew it ships with FreeDOS and the bundled drivers only target Vista. But there’s the internet, there’s the manufacturer’s website, where you can grab whatever software you need. I armed myself with the previously-mentioned Kubuntu — it spotted the monitor just fine (though that’s arguably XOrg’s credit), set up a PPPoE connection without any trouble, and recognised the flash drive — everything works. So I head to the ASUS site. Finding only Vista and XP drivers there didn’t really bother me. I downloaded them and went to install my old friend Microsoft® Windows™ 2000. No need to have been afraid of the SATA drive — it recognised it natively (and I almost bought a USB floppy), installed just fine, looking all ugly at 640×480… ugh…
I launch the video driver to give my eyes a break, and that specimen of half-baked ATI software, written by ham-fisted Indian coders, tells me: “I will only run under Microsoft® Windows™ XP (yuck! — ed.), and what you have is not an operating system, it’s rubbish — go away.”
Not fatal, not terrifying. You can poke around, empirically figure out which video drivers fit best, and work around it. However, it turns out that the video driver package also includes drivers for the chipset (!), which nobody offers separately… Bastards…
The executive decision to convert to Islam and go to war against the goyim to install FreeBSD and start fighting for (or against) KDE I won’t describe in detail — I’ll just say that out of sheer paranoia I wiped the installed FreeBSD because the hard drive seemed to be clicking.
I returned to the camp of capitalism’s plunderers and finally installed (for the first time in my life, on my own machine) XP (yuck!)
Yuck-yuck-yuck three more times on the heads of its developers, but what a piece of work it is. Right now I remind myself of the mouse that cries, pricks itself, but keeps eating the cactus. The drivers went in, everything seems to run, and then new joys appeared.
As it turned out, this laptop model, blessed by gods and men alike, has an extremely unpleasant quirk — or perhaps “it is not a bug, it’s a feature” ©. It manifests in the fact that the forced-ventilation system, which runs with a characteristically unpleasant high-pitched noise, runs almost continuously. That is, a practically idle laptop with only a browser open heats the CPU to 55°C, switches on the fan, cools it down to 50°C in 30–40 seconds, and turns the fan off. Twenty seconds later the cycle repeats. The result is that the fan is almost never off. The irritating noise is getting on my nerves; I’m thinking about fan wear, and about how it will behave under any even moderately serious game.
Against that backdrop, incorrect battery readings feel like a minor, trivial problem. A fully charged laptop reports 98% charge. And after a day the battery stops charging already at 95%. The trend is deeply unsatisfying. In the BIOS, unlike the old model, there is no battery recalibration option. BIOS version is 2.09; the website has 2.02.
Right now I’m thinking about trying the last alternative OS option, watching the patient’s behaviour, and probably taking it to a service centre. Though first I should remember to write them a letter so the trip isn’t wasted.
They’re right when they say — an old friend is better than two girlfriends two new ones…
Sad. I console myself with the thought that before the fans die, the machine will be morally obsolete :)