What do you think of my new Dell 1720? Will be Vista/Ubuntu and MediaDirect...

So, I've just ordered a Dell Inspiron 1720, and I wanted to know what others thought of the specs. I'm very excited to get it, but it's been in Pre-Production since I ordered it on the 29th December 2007.

It is due for delivery on the 17th January 2008:

Here are the specs:

Inspiron 1720 CORE 2 DUO T7250 2.00GHz,800,2MB Cache
17.0" Widescreen WXGA+ (1440x900) TFT Display with TrueLife¿
Ruby Red Colour with Microsatin Finish & 2.0mp camera
Memory Dual-Channel 2048MB (2x1024) 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive 250GB Serial ATA (5400RPM)
Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including software
Primary 6-cell 56WHr Li-Ion Battery
NVIDIA® GeForce¿ Go 8600M GT with 256MB DDR2 dedicated graphic memory
UK Modem Cable and Adapter Internal V.92 Data, Fax, Voice Functions
Intel® Pro Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g Mini-PCI Card EUR
European - Dell TrueMobile 355 internal Bluetooth Module
Uk/Irish Internal Keyboard (QWERTY)
English - Vista Home Premium ​

For (English Pounds) 570.

I've been reading up about doing a clean re-install, so as soon as i get my new laptop, i'm going to be using GParted to delete all the partitions.

Then I'll put in the MediaDirect 3.3 CD, and choose Option 2. After I've allocated 40GB for Vista, I'll take out the MD3.3 CD and do the Vista Install using the Vista DVD. During the Vista re-install, i'll install the Hard Disk drivers, and then after completing the installation, I will reboot and insert the MD3.3 CD again.

Complete installing MD3.3, (reboot), and make sure that it starts up using the MD button.

Then i'll install Ubuntu. I'll give Ubuntu between 20GB and 35GB, and during the install I'll be putting GRUB on the Ubuntu extended partition. I might leave 512MB for Swap. The rest of the space will be formatted in EXT3, and will act as a shared storage partition, which both Vista and Ubuntu will be able to see.

If you're still reading, I would really appreciate some feedback.

 

Ok, first, vista doesn't play well with the EXT3 format (as in, it won't even see it)

Here's what I did:

1. wipe drive, boot with mediadirect 3.3 cd, give it the partitions it wants, and choose the option that makes 1 partition for windows, then the rest as a "Data" partition
2. Gave windows some space, and left the rest for Ubuntu
3. Installed windows XP and left said data partition unformatted
4. booted Dell Ubuntu distro (has built in drivers for wireless and sound) and installed to "data" partition with EXT3 filesystem, and 2gigs for swap.
5. booted into windows to finish the media direct install.

Those should work exactly the same for vista.

 

Thanks for the steps!

At the moment, I'm dual-booting XP with Ubuntu, and I can access my Ubuntu partitions from XP using EXT2IFS ( www.fs-driver.org). It works really well, and I am hoping the program will work in Vista as well.

Here's a thread that you, or others might want to look at, concerning Vista and EXT3:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=236274