Suse 10.0 on a Presario V2000

Well, I decided to give a new lease on life to my notebook, and I increased the RAM from 512Mb to 1Gb and substituted the old 4200rpm 40Gb HD by a Seagate 5400rpm 80Gb that also uses less than half the power. Things are looking good, and the machine is much more responsive than before (I also took the chance to take it apart completely and superglue the left hinge that broke when I dropped it a few months ago).

This notebook has worked flawlessly since I bought it, apart from the fact that the silver paint in the region where I rest my hands is completely gone. Blame it on long hours programming or on crappy finish... Anyway, I decided to install a flavor of linux to do some coding every now and then and to write my papers, since I prefer Kile to Miktex+texmaker/winedt. I've been using Suse 10 in the office (I managed to get the IT guys to leave half the space in the HD in a separate partition and then installed it. Ha! Who needs premission now to install freeware, hu?) so I decided to install it in my notebook as well. To be honest, I almost wish I had something more to report. Everything worked. The wireless card (with encryption), the 14.1" widescreen display, the audio, everything. I only have a complain with Suse 10 and it is that it always seems to hang when doing the "Online Update" that is offered right before the installation finishes. My advice: finish the installation. Try the online update some other time after rebooting.

Anyway, my notebook shows a gret improvement in usability. I'm sure CPU benchmarks will be the same, but the improved access times to the hard drive and the extra memory really help. If you are stuck wit the 4200rpm hard drive and can afford to upgrade it I strongly recommend you to do so. You won't regret it.

So now you know. If you are looking for a linux distro for a notebook, try SUSE. Oh! One last thing: install KDE as default. For some reason the Gnome 2.12 desktop is awfully slow in Suse (and it IS a suse problem becasue this doesn't happen in Fedora or Ubuntu). Night night...