Quote:As some of my regular readers may remember, my Gateway laptop didn’t work out so well. The keyboard was practically falling apart on its own, the battery life was less than an hour and a half on the strictest powersave setting, and Acer (who handles support for Gateway) wouldn’t cover it. That whole ordeal is still not settled, though I couldn’t wait for a resolution (since I’m in College) and I found myself in the market for a new laptop quite a bit sooner than I originally planned. 

The first thing I did was look into System76. For an Ubuntu fan like me, those machines look very enticing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money to pay up front, so without a financing plan (that I could find) System76 was out. I decided to get a Dell. Not just any Dell, an Ubuntu Dell. I ended up with an Inspiron 15n, and I thought I would take the time to write up a quick blog about it.

 

First of all, I didn’t buy the laptop “as is”, I decided to customize mine quite a bit. For that reason, the laptop I received is a bit different than the one you’d receive unless you matched your configurations to mine. At the time of this writing, Dell equips their Ubuntu Inspiron 15n’s with a Pentium Dual Core T4200 processor, 3GB of RAM, a 4 cell battery, an integrated Intel X4500HD graphics chip, and the usual 802.11G wireless card.

 

For my build, I chose a 2.0ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 2MB cache, 4GB of RAM, a 9 cell battery, a brighter screen, a green finish and a 3 year onsite warranty to avoid getting myself into the same situation I did with Acer/Gateway. I decided not to go with a webcam because I have no use for one. I asked my sales guy for the smallest possible hard drive I could get, because I didn’t really need a hard drive since I planned to reuse the 500GB hard drive that was in my Gateway. I ended up with a 160GB drive, which I don’t think was an option on the Dell site but I could be wrong.

 

Unfortunately, I’m a bit confused about how much RAM this laptop will support. From the instruction manual it appears that this system supports up to 8GB, though 4GB is the most you can order on Dell’s site, and Crucial’s site claims that this system only supports up to 4GB. If anyone has managed to pump 8GB of RAM into this machine, please let me know in the comments.