My trusty old Acer TravelMate 2490 is getting - well old. It is running Windows XP ok, but could do with a reinstall. Ubuntu has been performing well and I recently upgraded from 10.04 to 10.10. But memory is sparse (1.5 GB - well enough for Ubuntu - a little on the low side for Windows XP) and the battery is tired - very tired. Ubuntu reports that it is down to 6.6 % and it can barely hold power for the boot sequence.
So it was time for a new computer. The tm2490 has not been retired yet - I will run a recovery for Windows XP and readjust the split for Windows/Ubuntu filespace. It will then serve as a computer for our soon to be 4-year-old. I am keeping the Windows XP just in case some of the educational games we have won't run under Wine.
I have been on the hunt for a new computer for a couple of months now and had a few favourites. I wanted a smaller computer than the tm2490 (a 15.4") preferably a 13.3" with a long battery life. Small and light with plenty of battery life so that I can use it for programming and web development. I would also like a reasonable 3D Graphics card as I spend time playing 3D games (WoW, Planet Calypso, etc, and hopefully Civ V soon - mostly in Windows, sorry!). But as our budget did not allow any new purchases during that time span I kept looking.
As an opening in our budget opened it would not support a small, speedy 13" 3D racer. So I decided upon the Acer Aspire 5738ZG. Specifications: Intel Pentium T4500 (dual core, 2.3 GHz), ATI Radeon HD4650 (1GB), 4 GB DDR3, 320 GB HDD, 15.6" (1366 x 768) LCD.
This laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit preinstalled, which I intend to keep. Partly for gaming, partly as I need to know Windows 7 better for my everyday work needs (I sell computers).
Acer used to devide their hard drives into 3 partitions, of which 2 were visible to the user. One "Windows" partion (usually named "ACER"), one Recovery partition (hidden from Windows), and one data partition (usually named "ACERDATA"). The plan was that you use the "ACERDATA" to store your documents and other user files and leave the "ACER" partition for Windows and installed programs. If You needed to recover or re-install Windows you then would not loose your documents, music, pictures, etc. I am not awar if this has changed with Windows 7, but at least on this computer, there was only the recovery partition and one large Windows partition.
This lap top is a bit bigger and heavier than I wanted but so far it has been a good machine to work on. In my next post I will be covering my Ubuntu experiences on this computer.
