Vostro V13

Mon Feb 1 12:15:41 PST 2010

I recently bought a Dell Vostro V13 laptop. Fed Ex delivered it just today. It comes with Stock Ubuntu 9.04 and weighs only three and a half pounds. The price was only $450 for system with camera (I hardly take photos), bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, mini xpress card slot, and a card reader. It has an internal battery. I fired it up right away. Once again, Dell is on it. It has to be the return of Michael Dell. I believe the only thing about Dell is that the quality of the screen is not always so bright on some systems, but so far, this one is good.

From what I can see this is good. I guess the gotcha is the fact that if you want to run programs such as ITunes, GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) isn't geared for that at the moment. I don't have a lot of experience with ITunes, but something about it just doesn't seem right. It seems that Apple is forming this producer/consumer model. But trust me, this laptop is built to be free. It does use one proprietary driver (the wl driver for broadcom wireless), but there is a free driver for it. I use the free driver on other systems and it works quite well. The video is Intel, the XD4500M or something like that. I haven't taken it for a full run, but it looks good. So, in ten years, when that proprietary vendor stops supporting releases, libre support will still be there.

Below, are some photos. The lighting could be a little better. You can check the photos on Dell's site as well.