[NBLUG/talk] New Inspiron 1420n

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Sun Aug 19 11:43:51 PDT 2007


Hello everybody,

Five days ago I got a new computer. It's a Dell Inspiron 1420n laptop
with Ubuntu 7.04 factory installed. :-D

Here's a picture:
http://img239.imageshack.us/img239/3438/displaypb2.jpg

The Ubuntu install itself seems completely unmodified except for a
Conexant modem driver and the Intel wireless driver. I see no Dell
branding in the OS at all except for the default host name (which is,
imaginatively enough, "dell").

So far, I am thrilled both with Fiesty and with the laptop itself.
Fiesty's restricted driver manager and video codec installers are
great, and Compiz is only a few clicks away (yay, wobbly windows). :-)

I ordered the cheapest processor option, a dual-core 1.5GHz/667MHz
Centrino. The machine came with a free upgrade to 2Gb of memory and a
160Gb hard drive. It features built-in wired and wireless networking
(bluetooth is available as an option, which I skipped).

One thing that I missed on the spec sheet that came as a pleasant
surprise is the built-in SD card reader! I can just pop in the card
from my camera, and a photo viewer open up:

http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/4996/sdcardyj5.jpg

Along the front edge of the laptop, going from the left, you can see
the slot with the SD card in it, the switch to toggle the WiFi on and
off, and the audio jacks. Interestingly, the screen has no latch on
it; some spring mechanism in the hinge causes the screen to snap shut
once it is closed past a certain threshold.

Barely visible in the picture, between the keyboard and the hinge for
the screen, is a series of playback buttons (stop, play, fast forward,
rewind, mute, volume up/down). All of them work out of the box.

Next to the power button is a button with a home icon on it; for some
reason, pressing it launches RhythmBox. Go figure.

Also, the delete key has been moved up to the far right corner of the
keyboard (on my previous laptop, it was located just the left of the
arrow keys). Now it looks like delete will rival escape as the hardest
key to hit while using vi. :-P

Speaking of my previous laptop, here's a picture of the 1420n side by
side with the old laptop, an Inspiron 1000:

http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/5794/sidebysideim9.jpg

The 1000 is about two years old (note all the dust!), and at the time
I bought it it was literally the cheapest laptop Dell made. :-)
(Incidentally, that is the machine my sister is getting now, and that
we're getting a UPS for...I still don't really know if it was worth
getting a UPS for, but I digress.) (The yucky cardboard in the lower
left corner of the photo is the box that the 1420n came in.)

The 1000 featured a CD/DVD drive (visible), three USB ports, wired
modem and networking and a video out (all on the back), a PCMCIA slot
on the far (left) side, and not really much else.

Visible on the 1650, from front to back (left to right in the
picture), is the round power socket, ventilation slots, a firewire
port, a PCMCIA slot, and two USB ports below the PC slot. The far
(right) side features two more USB ports, a video out, a CD/DVD drive,
and an S-Video TV-out connector (ooh...). The wired ethernet and phone
jacks are on the back.

So far, I am quite happy with the 1420n. It seems rugged, is
full-featured, and has Linux. :-)

My only caveat: If you buy this machine expecting it to be "clean" of
Microsoft, you will be disappointed. There is a "DellUtility"
partition that contains what looks to be a Windows 9X-based OS (I see
lots of com files and batch files). Interestingly, the only CD-ROM
shipped with the system seems to be a vanilla Ubuntu disc. I haven't
pulled off the shrink-wrap to verify what's really on there.

That said, I am pleased with my purchase. It feels good to "put my
money where my mouth is" by buying a Linux system, and I'm glad to
know that if the hardware dies, the tech support people can't just
hang up on me when I explain that I don't have Windows installed. :-D

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

I'm right now looking for a summer software engineering internship in
northern California! My resume is online here:
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/People/WilliamTracy



More information about the talk mailing list