On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Mike Miller wrote: > On Wed, 11 Aug 2010, Jason Hsu, embedded engineer, Linux user wrote: > >> Why isn't your son satisfied with the old Dell laptop? How old is this >> laptop? What does he want in a new laptop? > > It is from about 2003. He says that he has trouble watching internet > videos. He says that it doesn't hibernate when he closes the case. > > Well, I didn't know about the internet video problem and I haven't tried > to fix it. I think I couldn't get the hibernation to work and told him > he'd have to do it by hand before shutting the case. > > We can't get over the fact that it is slower than a newer computer. This (excellent) video is choppy when he runs it in Firefox at full 720p resolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA It isn't because of the network -- the video is choppy (but not the audio) even when it is fully downloaded. Regarding hibernation: The problem is that it doesn't come back up. We get a black screen. I found that we could sometimes recover using something like Alt-F1, Alt-F7, but this does not always work. Any ideas? >> Has he tried using antiX Linux or Puppy Linux on the old laptop? You >> haven't told us anything about the hardware specs. > > Haven't tried them. I have noticed that you are an advocate. This is a Dell Latitude D800 with 1 GB RAM. Do you think one of those mini-Linuxes will make it do better with YouTube videos in Firefox than it is now doing with Ubuntu 10.04? I should also try Chrome. >> I like the idea of running Windows in Virtualbox better than dual >> booting. (I haven't gotten around to trying this myself, though.) > > It would be easy to buy a machine with Windows on it, then add Ubuntu as > the second OS. Regarding this, I suppose it is possible to have Ubuntu and Win7 as dual boot and still run XP, say, in VirtualBox. I might actually do that. Mike