Dell Studio 15n Review

There are tons of reviews of this laptop, but few cover the Linux version. I'm therefore going to focus more on the Linux-specific things.

I left Ubuntu 8.04 on the machine rather than upgrading to 8.10 Intrepid. I've tried 8.10 and Jaunty Alpha Live CDs, and they seem to work, but aren't quite worth upgrading for. Maybe when the Jaunty 9.04 final is released...

I have the LED backlit display, which is really bright and seems whiter than a CCFL backlight. It also certainly seems to help with battery life.

The battery easily lasts upwards of 4 hours (lowered brightness, but with wireless on). The GNOME power applet reports power usage of about 12.4W idle on battery. A Kill-A-Watt power meter measures about 19W at the outlet at full brightness, and 16W dimmed. Much better than my old desktop (with CRT monitor) at upwards of 400W!

Suspend and hibernate work most of the time out of the box, and I've found a fix (click here) for completely reliable resumes. Before, it would occasionally freeze upon resume. It also wouldn't reconnect to Bluetooth devices upon resume and required a sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop; sleep 1; sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start. (The restart action doesn't work; a separate stop and start is necessary, for whatever reason).

Two quirks with suspend still remain: Sometimes it makes a popping noise (from the speakers) when it suspends. Sometimes a suspend/resume cycle changes the text console backgrounds to green, blue, white, orange, or pink, which are seen for a few seconds while resuming, or if you press CTRL-ALT-F1. Weird, but not critical.

The built-in camera works with the Cheese Photo Booth that comes with Ubuntu. Quality is okay for videoconferencing, but significantly grainy, especially in dim light.

Overall, I'm quite happy with this computer, and am glad that Dell offers it with Ubuntu preinstalled.