At Southeast LinuxFest, ZaReason (the company that made my laptop Betty two years ago) had a table.

This is Courtney with a few of ZaReason's latest models. From left to right are the Strata 3660, Strata Pro 15, and the Terra HD.

The Terra HD is the one I want to talk about today. Some of you might remember the Terra A20 netbook, which was very popular in "mocha" colour. Apparently one of the big complaints people had about it was battery life. The Terra HD is its successor, and it reportedly (I didn't hog it that long) gets over 6 hours battery with its optional 6-cell battery (4-5 with wireless going). Also, I'm totally in love with this little netbook (don't worry $boyfriend, not that way).

Celeste Lyn Paul and I were hanging out at the ZaReason booth chatting with Courtney and Mark (Terranova, not S, don't get your knickers in a twist) when Celeste started fawning over the Terra HD. It's got an 11.6" screen and, as Mark was quick to point out, a 100% size keyboard, not one of those annoying 93% keyboards. I typed on it a bit, and yeah, the keyboard is the right size. I don't hit the wrong keys or anything. Great! This is a first for me and netbooks. Minor problem for my (very) long nails is slipping off the keycaps into the gap between the keys (like on a MacBook), but I think a day or two of typing on it would see me adjusted.

Then Courtney suggested Celeste pick it up and see how light it is, while Mark informed us that he always has to double check his backpack to be sure it's actually there. Celeste seemed surprised by how light it was, so I asked to hold it. When she handed it to me, my hands went UP! Theoretically, it's 2.9 pounds. It felt more like -5oz. And yes, that's with the 6-cell battery, not with the little 3-cell.

Some women fawn over shoes or purses. For me, it's laptops and laptop bags. This little beauty is available with either a red or a black lid (I guess this is where the obligatory "aww, no pink?" joke comes in), has 802.11n wifi, has options for 1 or 2 GiB of RAM, choice between a normal hard disk or SSD, and even has 3G as an option. And yes, it has ZaReason's signature Ubuntu Circle of Friends super key. Oh, and for the KDE fans, Mark is looking into adding Kubuntu Netbook Remix to the OS dropdown list (though as I understand it, you could just request that in the comments box when ordering, and they'd do it).

I've said before that I'm not getting a netbook til I can get an ARM one, but there's a netbook with a perfectly-sized keyboard that's light as a feather. I don't think I can pass that up. It's out of stock right now, so that gives me time to save up some dough and buy one ;-) Oh, and since no super-quick played-with-it-and-fell-in-love hardware review is complete without the pricetag: it starts at $449.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

The saddest thing is a laptop firmware that provides a valid embedded controller operation region but which then proceeds to read and write embedded controller registers by banging on ioports itself rather than listening to the operating system.

No really. I prefer GNOME, so clearly pretty isn’t the biggest factor here. When I first started using Ubuntu, I would drag the top GNOME panel to the bottom and have  it sit under what is normally the bottom panel. It looked ugly as sin, but this is how, as (back in 2005) a recent Windows refugee, I was used to working and so this is how I chose to organise my space.

Most importantly, it wasn’t hard for me to do this. My most recent installs, almost 4 years later, primarily on laptops rather than desktops tended to be left as is — a panel at the top  and a panel at the bottom. I find this seems to suit laptops better, and I’ve become accustomed to it. However, had I not been able to move the panel from the start, I might even have ended up on Kubuntu. Well, if it were not for the silly single-click thing that fires stuff off even when you don’t want it to, like when you bump the mouse accidentally. Ok, truth be told, I probably would have stuck with Ubuntu, because, well, all the functionality was still there. Just in a different place to where I was expecting

As with most computer users, I’ve never owned a Mac. When I was little, my school had a some (iirc) Mac II’s but I am pretty certain that the number of times that I, at 28, have used a Mac since would barely exceed the number of digits on my hands, and OS X is nothing like the first Macs I used. I think the last time I used a Mac was in 2005; for about 20 minutes.

But now with the sneaky Lucid UI changes, I might as well be using OS X as far as my learned behaviours are concerned. And lets just hope that my laptop trackpad doesn’t jump at an inopportune time — like it does sometimes when I go to open the system menu and instead hit the firefox icon right next to it instead — as trackpads are prone to.

I work 100% from a laptop and use the trackpad 90% of the time. The chance this ridiculous UI change will not bite me hard is pretty slim. The only plus I’ve come across so far is that it made it easier to close out of the awkwardly oversized evolution setup wizard that launched on my eeepc701.

However, putting even that glaring risk aside, the one thing that I am absolutely hating the most about these sneaky UI changes is the abolishment of informative tooltips. This is a loss of functionality.

My battery icon, my wifi connection icon, my xchat icon — they now tell me nothing when I merely nudge them, I now have to smack them over the head with the cursor. I cannot tell at quick glance if I have enough charge for something, on the wrong wifi network, or whether I can ignore that xchat message I missed the notification for. I have to exert time, energy, and most importantly brain focus to get what used to be a simple matter of an effortless enlightenment. I now have to go through what is sometimes several clicks. Extra clicks are bad. Clicks add obscurity. Extra clicks are effort.

This bleeps me right off. I can learn to move a mouse in a different direction (though I’m not at all believing that new windows migrants will cope), but I really do not have the capacity to circumvent the application to read the bytes from the disk myself to find out what my battery level is without clicking through some dialogs. The software is supposed to do that for me.

Alas, my software no longer does this for me, and ergo, my software no longer works for me.

To get this information, I now have to do stuff for my software. I should not be working for my software.

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Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

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Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ’satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare, command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I?

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