Laptop struggles

I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago (early-mid March). It's a very nice laptop, with the following specs:

• Dell XPS M1530
• Intel Core2Duo T5450 Processor
• 2Gb DDR2 RAM
• 160Gb SATA HDD
• Nvidia 8400GS 128Mb Video Card
• Dell 1505 draft-n wireless card

This laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled from BestBuy. If you know me at all, you know that I'm not a big fan of Vista, or Microsoft in general. It pays the bills to know how to use and support the software, but that's as far as I like to take my relationship with them.

In spite of that, I decided to give Vista on this laptop a fair shake. Right off the bat, I clashed with UAC (user access control). I hate it. Any time I wanted to do anything (I do a lot of system admin work) I had to "Approve/Deny" it. It took me just a few moments to find the setting to disable UAC, then I was back to working.

I managed to hook the laptop up to my TV through HDMI (yeah, the XPS has an HDMI port... how awesome is that?) and watch some Hulu.com on the 56" TV. All was going well, then I noticed that the wireless-n wasn't connecting at the appropriate speed to my D-Link router. My wife's Windows XP machine (don't get me started...) has a Belkin wireless card that consistently connects at 270Mbps, whereas my Vista machine was only getting 130Mbps.

After doing some research, I found out that it was due to the bandVista was using to connect (20Mhz vs 40Mhz for the higher speeds). However, if I changed it over to 40Mhz, even if I was sitting next to the router I'd lose connection after so many seconds.

Because of all this, I decided to give Linux a whirl on it. I first installed Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. Realizing that my wireless card had a Broadcom chipset, I knew I was in for an interesting time, but I didn't know the half of it... Apparently there's a bug in the linux kernel (between 2.6.23 and 2.6.24-14) that stops Ndiswrapper from working correctly, which means it stopped me from using my wireless card. I tested this on both Ubuntu and Foresight Linux 2.0. There were workarounds before the Ubuntu update was released, and I could manage to connect that way, but it was shaky at best.

Once I heard about the Ubuntu update (I think it was a kernel update, to 2.6.24-15-generic), I formatted and reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. I installed Ndiswrapper, the Windows wireless driver, and I was off and running. I set up my Nvidia card, all the "restricted" things (flash, java, codecs, dvd playback, etc.) and I was ready to roll. However, I soon noticed that even though Ndiswrapper was working and I could connect to the network just fine, I would randomly drop the connection. I'd be watching a video on Hulu.com and it would just stop playing. The only way I could get it to go again would be either to restart the system or "sudo rmmod ndiswrapper && sudo modprobe ndiswrapper" then wait for the connection to reestablish.

With that said, I've got my laptop at work with me today and it connected to our wireless-g network flawlessly (it even has WPA turned on, which I've never been able to configure on linux before without some major work). I set it up to ping google non-stop, and it hasn't dropped a single packet.

I think the final configuration (at least for the time being) for my laptop is going to be Windows XP Pro SP2 and Foresight Linux 2.0 (they don't have the kernel fix yet, but I can workaround and I'd really like to give it a fair shake). I'll update with more information as it becomes available.