I also got the replacement harddisk for my RAID5 array and installed that before I went on to my laptop. It is currently rebuilding the array (which takes quite a while when Azureus is running ;)).
Maxtor changed (in addition to the model nuber of course) the ID-string from “MAXTOR” to “Maxtor” which now looks a little odd, but I’ll survive…
Got my notebook yesterday (Tuesday), as UPS (on instructions from Dell) refused to hand it over to my neighbours as I had instructed on Monday.
There was a tiny problem with one of the lower metal “claws” of the keyboard which are supposed to go below the covering, but this one ended up above the plastic. Gave Dell support a ring (very clever move to use Meat Loaf’s “I’d do anything for Love” as one of the three songs of queueing music: the song is over 10mins long!), and a very nice support guy told me how to fix it myself (after asking whether I felt capable of doing it), which I did.
Other than that, it is a really nice machine. Quiet, fast, nice display, and reasonably easy to uninstall all the crud that they usually pre-install on laptops.
Didn’t Blogger once have an option to order the posts in chronological order within a day? The current (other) way really screws up my logic! 🙁
While doing all the defragging and partition-resizing, one of the disks in the RAID-array now tells me that a “S.M.A.R.T. failure [is] imminent”. Great. I have now ordered a new hard-disk from Alternate to replace the fudgy one. Of course, the exact model isn’t available anymore, so I chose one which sounded reasonably close. :S
As I’ve now been using GNU/Linux at work, I thought I might as well install it at home. I really liked Knoppix which works well with all my hardware. The problem now is that when you do a hard-disk install, the Knoppix-kernel is replaced with the default Debian-one (I suppose). And that one doesn’t know about my Adaptec 2400A IDE-RAID controller, and thus “panic”s.
Thus, I’m currently downloading Gentoo, which might be a bit above my head (the stage1 install certainly was), but we’ll see. Can’t be any worse than the pains with Partition Magic (7 crashes, 8 works) to actually free up some disk-space… 😉
Ordered the laptop on the 18th, it was shipped on the 21st and should be here tomorrow. Knock on wood.
Then ordered myself a really nice laptop (the price-range of which my parents do not entirely agree with…). I just hope that Dell‘s build quality is nice enough, in particular the keyboard – which according to reviews has not always been good…