For the last 6 months my Samsung laptop backlight has been flickering at me randomly and indiscriminately. Having had enough if this cyber “water” torture I finally relented and decided to buy a new laptop. As my customers always have good experiences with Dell equipment I decided I should take my own advice and buy from them. Running Ubuntu and already owning a entry level SSD I decided I didn’t need anything flashy but it had to have a decent amount of memory for running a Vista Virtual machine as and when the need arose. It would also need a 17″ screen as working in lots of SSH sessions at the same time is a pain for me with anything smaller.

I basically went for the base spec Inspiron 1750 except with 4 GB of memory and I have to say it is the best Linux experience I’ve had so far with a laptop. Everything pretty much worked straight away with a minimum of fuss.

Ok so onto the things I had to do.

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