If you’re looking for a workhorse, desktop replacement laptop it’s hard to find one more powerful than the Dell Studio 1747. Armed with an Intel Core i7, a 17″ inch display, and as much RAM as you’ll find in any laptop, the 1747 is a monster. Power aside, how does it fare as a Linux box? Almost perfect, but with one major flaw.

A few days ago, I caught a special on Geeks.com for a refurbished Dell Studio 1747 with the Core i7-720QM CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, and 17″ display at 1,600×900 resolution. It’s priced around $1,000 new as configured, and the Geeks price was less than $900. I was looking for a good laptop that had enough horsepower, storage, and screen space that it’d be equally useful in the home office and on the road and it looked like the Dell fit the bill.

After the 1747 showed up, I wasted no time blasting Windows 7 off the machine and whipping Linux on. The distro of choice, the 64-bit edition of Linux Mint 9 — a distro that has excellent hardware support, software selection, and all those pesky media codecs.

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