I've been taking care of a bad cough which is one of the reasons why I didn't write a blog entry last week. I'm still coughing but it isn't as bad as it was last week so I've decided to resume my blog entries.
A friend asked me to install Windows on his Dell Vostro 2420. The version that he purchased had Ubuntu 11.10 pre-installed on it. I got the chance to test it out for a few hours before reformatting it and installing Windows on it.
Hardware-wise, the Vostro 2420 sports a 14" screen and is about twice the thickness of my Samsung Chromebook. It is roughly the same thickness as my Acer Netbook (but obviously larger). It has a full-size keyboard (minus the numeric keypad). I find the keyboard to be quite good and I like the fact that it is easy to clean since the space between keys is "filled" so hair and dirt/dust can't easily slip inside the keyboard (and it is just a simple matter of vacuuming the keyboard). The trackpad is also very responsive.
The Dell Vostro comes with an HDMI port, 3 USB ports, a VGA port, and ethernet network port, a DVD-RW drive, an earphone/microphone jack, a built-in webcam, and an SD/MMC/MS memory card slot. I tested out the HDMI port on my HD television and it works very well, although with the resolution set on the laptop, part of display didn't appear on my television set. I've also tested the wireless connection and I found that it worked very well. The version that my friend purchased came with an Intel Core i3 CPU so it was relatively fast with Ubuntu 11.10 as well as when I reformatted it and installed Windows 7 on it.
The system boots up fast in Linux. I didn't get a chance to test out all the features of the Ubuntu 11.10 operating system but I didn't have any issues with it nor did I have any issues configuring it to work with my wireless router.
When booting up the system initially, it would go through a set-up and then prompt you to save a recovery disk. I opted to do this onto a USB thumbdrive and found that it worked well. I tested reformatting the machine with the USB thumbdrive and didn't experience any problems.
After trying the Ubuntu 11.10 for about 1 hour, I reformatted the laptop and installed Windows 7 onto it. The Windows 7 installation was very straightforward. After the system rebooted with Windows 7 installed, it didn't detect a few of the devices (video adapter, sound card, network card, wireless, & chipset). This was all available on Dell's website. For this laptop model, Dell has the drivers for Windows 7 (32bit & 64bit), Ubuntu, and Windows 8 (32bit & 64bit). The entire installation (with the drivers) took under 1 hour. What took long was downloading all of Microsoft's updates (I didn't time this and it would depend on the network speed as well as the version of Windows 7 that is being used for the installation but I would estimate that it took 1.5 hours to download/install all the Microsoft updates).
I used the laptop for a few hours with Windows 7 installed on it and I found it to be very fast/responsive. Since there was nothing installed on the laptop (excluding the operating system, the drivers, and a few standard applications that I installed for my friend (Adobe Flash, Acrobat Reader, HP Officejet Pro 8600 drivers/files (since he has the same printer as I do), and Google Chrome), I didn't really expect it to be slow.
In the short time that I used the laptop, I find it to be very good. I don't know how much my friend paid for it but the price will determine whether I would recommend it or not.
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