Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2007-9-25

OK, I'll wait another couple of weeks before putting Linux on my laptop

I have a laptop running Vista Home Premium, and have had a bunch of issues with it. It looks beautiful, but the following issues make life really difficult:

- If you have the TMM turned on, it autodetects external monitors, but then blanks and refreshes them every 5 minutes or so, sometimes moving windows around in the process. If you don't have TMM turned on, you have to configure external monitors manually.

- Sometimes after working for an hour or two, something screws up with the wifi and all my connections get denied - Firefox gives me 'connection denied' messages, and any command line networking tools just fail. This also happens often on resume from hibernation.

- Some things are inexplicably slow. Even with 3G of RAM, it takes several seconds to bring up the security screen after hitting ctrl-alt-del. I'm guessing that it's being unnecessarily swappy.

This has irritated me enough that for the last few days I've been working on my desktop machine, running XP pro, and just using my laptop as a second screen, and planning on giving Ubuntu a try on my laptop as soon as I get time to install it. However it sounds like Vista SP1 fixes many of my issues, so I might wait a little ... :-)

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