Something I've noticed now that I'm running an OS that makes it easier to see what's going on: when it is in danger of overheating, lots of freezy little pauses happen. The symptoms occur across both Windows and Linux, in retrospect, which is a dead giveaway that there's a hardware issue.

If I use the little CPU speed capplet to slow it to its slowest option, the freezes stop and, paradoxically, I have a "fast" computer again.

As a general rule the crap behavior doesn't occur when the laptop is on its USB-powered fan stand. I need to get one at home as well now that I've moved it to the office. It would also be nice to have mad money to spend on a new PC, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Ubuntu Linux in general has been working a champ lately. I got my dual monitor situation working the way I want it to. My impression is that on a newer machine Ubuntu would probably have offered to stretch the desktop across both monitors right off the bat. On this one, though, it wasn't quite sure how wide a horizontal screen my video card was capable of. I had to give it that one piece of information expressly in a configuration file. After that, the automatic goodness kicked in.

There was also an oddity with the monitor demanding to be driven as 1680 pixels across, not 1600, before the magic would work. So my total desktop is 3080x1050, not 3000x1050. Whatevah.

I still don't have a convenient file share for my coworkers to drop awesome DJ mixes important bizniz filez in. Yes, I'm perfectly capable of setting it up with chewing gum, baling wire and sheer dorkpower, but I'm playing it dumb and pushing Ubuntu bug reports back in an effort to make sure the GUI for all this works in the user-friendly way it's supposed to in the final release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Edit: the sharing GUI was enabled by installing the nautilus-share package, which I'm told will be "in the box" in the final Hardy Heron, but that still didn't actually work— the system complained that I needed to ask for help from my administrator (hello, this is a personal laptop) rather than simply displaying a root password prompt and then doing what needs to be done, which is more typical for Ubuntu. However, after a reboot, it did start to cooperate. The need for which needs to be documented or eliminated. Still a bug, in other words, but now I have a dropbox of my own.

Tags: dell latitude d610, linux, windows