Well, I'm a bit late - OK, several weeks late - with the promised laptop review because I've been tinkering with it and have now completely replaced my old Acer T140 desktop with it. Yes, that means an external monitor (21" Philips CRT - sorry, but old school CRTs still beat LCDs for picture quality), external keyboard (picked up a Gigabye Technology US layout keyboard with a free optical mouse for only 4 pounds from Ebuyer!) and an external USB optical mouse (not the free one I got, but one I got from Ebuyer a year or so ago that's just ace).

Love the quietness of the laptop - the fan does kick in every few minutes (and if you hammer the CPU, it'll speed up the fan) to cool the unit down, but even with that minimal fan noise, I can still sleep through the night with the laptop on overnight in my bedroom - something I definitely couldn't do with the Acer desktop.

Installed 2GB RAM into the laptop - 78 quid for some Corsair Value Select SODIMMs from Ebuyer - though I had to return one of the two sticks via recorded delivery because it didn't work (the replacement was fine though). I'm running a rather bleeding edge 64-bit Ubuntu at the moment on the laptop - Feisty Fawn pointing to its dev repositories and, yep, the devs do indeed randomly break things.

I was initially worried that the Intel 950 onboard graphics had some sort of glitch that caused occasional lines to stay on the screen, but after a few weeks of updates had filtered through, it looks like it was an X server bug and no problems now.

Still using mplayer in Linux (fullscreen) to watch US TV shows and it does a sterling job on the laptop, even though its 1280x800 resolution still leaves black bars above and below a widescreen programme. For games, I tend to reboot into 32-bit Vista and once I realised that you have to install DirectX 9 in Vista (yes, it can co-exist with DirectX 10 and hence it's 100% ludicrous MS didn't ship Vista with DX 9 and 10!) to get XP games to work in Vista, then things seemed to run fairly smoothly.

I bought the Fritz 10 chess game - 17.99 quid at play.com, which I thought was a decent price for one of the strongest chess progs in the world - and the Intel graphics struggle a bit on the 3D boards which disappointed me slightly, but I was cheered up when Flatout 2 ran fine at 1024x768 with the textures/viewing distance slightly turned down (yes, I remembered to bring my saved game settings across from the old PC too). Basically, the laptops will play some games with settings turned down, but I'm not expecting the latest and greatest to run particularly well (hey, that's what my next desktop PC - a quad core with 4GB RAM - I'll be buying next year will be for ).

I'll probably replace Ubuntu with 64-bit Fedora 7 final when that's out next month, because I found Ubuntu frustratingly devoid of many packages I regularly use and I had to run Synaptic over 20 times as I kept remembering stuff that wasn't on the default media install of Ubuntu...grr... The worst thing was the lack of gcc and its associated dev tools - I can't remember the last time I installed a desktop Linux distro that didn't have those in the default install!

Overall, I'm very happy with the laptop - dual core 64-bit goodness with 2GB RAM and a gimmicky Web cam, what more could you want?...