So, I have been using Opiate for the last four months as my primary machine.

All in all, I am exceptionally happy with this machine. It has proven with a couple of small exceptions, to be an incredibly robust, and reliable machine. It accomplishes everything that Stinkfist did for me, as well as being mobile.

Let’s start out with the bad, and get that out of the way, shall we?

1. The plug for an external monitor is VGA, not DVI. This in itself, is not a huge issue. The real issue is that it’s vga with no way of physically securing the cable to the laptop, so it is always loose, and the image quality sucks ass. I returned a 24″ LCD because of this.
2. This wireless card and Ubuntu, simply do not get along. I’m blaming it on the 64 bit, development distribution that I use, when in reality, it’s probably that I fucked something up, and I am too lazy to fix it.
3. 10/100 Ethernet is kind of a drag. Gig-E would have been much nicer, enough though I would have had to upgrade everything else.
4. The headphone jack doesn’t work in Linux. Not sure about the microphone jack, as I have no use for it at all.
5. Bluetooth seems to be a pain in the ass with Ubuntu. Might mess around with that tonight.
6. A weird clicking sound comes from under the left palm rest if the machine has been sitting idle for a few hours, and does not go away unless you power it down for a few hours. I think it is the harddisk.
7. The USB ports are TIGHT. To the point that I occasionally worry about breaking stuff when I am pulling stuff out of them
8. Battery life, when booted into Ubuntu is a joke. Probably my fault, not congiguring something.
9. Just like the K1 KRZR, this thing finger prints like a mother fucker. Damn attraction to shiny things.
10. Lightscribe did not work in 64 bit Linux when I tried a few months ago.
11. The USB port doesn’t put out enough juice, while booted into Linux, to charge my Blackberry. This means I need to carry a dedicated charger, which is a pain in the ass.
12. Limited to 1 gig Ram. I’d like to have 2 gigs, minimum. This is just me being greedy though. It’s not needed, yet.

So, what about the good?

1. Ubuntu has proven to me that GNU/Linux machines can be great media centers. It handles everything that I throw at it, with no problems at all. All the codecs are there, and everything just works.
2. Openbox and Gnome make a wonderful desktop.
3. It’s portable. I can take it to work if I need to, and have access to all my my stuff.
4. No matter what I throw at it, it just keeps chugging along. It’s ripped 40 DVD’s to div-x in the last 24 hours, with nary a complaint.
5. I was bang on about the 14″ widescreen. Anything bigger would have irritated me. Slightly higher resolution would have been nice though. Say, 1440*900. Something like that.
6. The media drives (card reader and dvd+/-rw) work just fine, for reading and writing.
7. The screen is nice and glossy, easy to view in any kind of lighting conditions.
8. All the function keys, screen brightness, media controls, etc, worked out of the box with a default Ubuntu install. No tweaking or massaging needed.
9. It works as a perfect remote control for the media box that sits under the TV. Listening to my music over the stereo, rather than the tinny laptop speakers is a blessing.
10. TCP/IP over IEEE1394, straight to the server oh so hot.
11. A virtual penis of 104 cm makes me giggle.

All in all, this Laptop was an excellent purchase, regardless of what some people will say regarding the fact that it is AMD based, rather than Intel. All of the Intel machines that I looked at, in the same size, and price range were CoreSolo, rather than CoreDuo, which was the key selling point for me on this machine. Dual Core, SATA, and dedicated graphics card were what I was after, and this machine met all of those needs, at an over all price of less than $100.00 (yes, less than One Hundred CDN, no, it wasn’t off the back of a truck, yes, I have a receipt.) out of my pocket, I could not have done better.

It’s ability to run alternative Operating Systems has been excellent, almost everything has worked out of the box, and the few features that haven’t worked, well, I really don’t give a shit about. I’m more worried about performance and reliability, than I am the convenience of something like Wi-Fi.

It’s never locked up, never frozen up, and even though X sometimes freezes for a moment during moments of heavy I/O, well, I can live with that.

When I wear this thing out, problably a year from now, I will not hesitate to purchase another Compaq, and I never thought that I would say that after last years fiasco with the Presario 2410 last winter.