My own experience with my HP Compaq nx7010 has been generally positive though I have had a few "issues". Ubuntu Breezy supports all of the Laptop's hardware (sans the NDA encumbered SD Card reader) out of the box. Wireless, Network, Video, everything. Fedora Core 4 required some tweaking to get things to work. The proprietary ATI FireGL drivers in the Multiverse deb archive were required to get decent 3D performance though. But they installed flawlessly too. The hardware reliability on the other hand has been where I've been let down. My hard disk's heads crashed after 11 months of use (just before the 1year international warranty ran out thankfully). The laptop can also suffer a bit from over heating. Not too bad but really extended use (ie, days of uptime) can cause issues. Especially on the really hot days here in Australia (high 30's and low 40's). And lately when USB devices are plugged in it can fail to finish the POST. Though that could be the USB devices more than the laptop causing the issues. Laptops are great but if you want a workhorse that keeps on trucking for years at a time, nothing beats a (under-the-)desktop box. ;) Regards Gavin Denby wrote:
Sorry to hear about the issues, I have several acers and we had a similar but easily fixed problem.
The poor airflow is really bad dust protection, So what we do is use a household vacuum cleaner and the crevice tool (narrow slot thing) to vacuum all the cooling ports. Diagnostics usually show a 15 - 20 degree drop in the CPU temp after this. No need to open the Laptop, but it pays to not do while its running.