Ubuntu on my new Compaq Presario F763nr
Ok, so as you may have guessed from my other posts, I’m a big Apple fan - I have two main machines, an Intel Core Duo iMac and a Core Duo 2 Macbook.
I love both machines, but the Macbook is severly under utilized. The only time I use the laptop is when I go out of town or my wife or I may use it if the other one is on the main machine.
I wanted to get a cheap laptop and sell the Macbook to put some money toward bills, in comes the Presario F700 series…
First I looked on Craigslist to see what was available, then I checked online and local stores and they were all a little more than I wanted to spend. Craigslist had some in my range, but for really old ones.
Then I stopped by Frys on the way home from work and the had the Compaq Presario F763nr for sale for $400 and the specs are not bad:
- 1.9 Ghz AMD Dual Core Athlon X2 (64 bit)
- 1 Gig RAM
- 120 Gig HD
- 15″ XGA screen
- 802.11 b/g
- Ethernet and modem
- 3 USB ports, VGA & Svideo out and multi-card reader built in
- Vista Home (only negative I saw)
Needless to say it sounds like a pretty damn good Linux box, so I picked it up.
My wife checks her hotmail, uses Office to do some bills and word processing and browses the web on the laptop. She doesn’t really care if she uses Windows or Mac, but I didn’t want her to have to learn the differences with Linux.
So I repartitioned the drive in Vista and installed Ubuntu 8.04, I decided to do the dual boot so my wife could use Windows and I could use Ubuntu.
The only things not working out of the box were the wireless card and display drivers. I fixed the display drivers by adding the Nvidia drivers via the software install tool.
For the wireless I followed the info at this link.
Now the machine is fully functional, everything works great and it SCREAMS in Ubuntu. I’m figuring I can get around $800 - $900 for the Macbook and I have no doubt I’ll be very happy with the Presario in its current configuration. 
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Ubuntu on my new Compaq Presario F763nr…
[...] an interesting post was made today on this site [...]……