My HP laptop was - at long last - about to die. So for my sins, I got a new Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop - with Windows Vista Ultimate. I experimented with Vista for a couple of weeks; while it was pretty, it annoyed me nearly instantly. I waited for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to be released; its arrival was a godsend. As soon as it came out, I turned the Lenovo into a dual boot machine.

The performance differential is huge. What once was a slow clunker turned into a graceful, fast and elegant machine. I asked someone to time me while I booted the same machine up using Ubuntu as opposed to Vista - Ubuntu was eight minutes faster.

This is not to say that Ubuntu didn’t need tweaking; unfortunately there were two problems to be addressed at the outset - the audio didn’t work, and there was an annoying screen flicker associated with the Nvidia driver.

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