Laptop setup

So the laptop I picked up is an acer TravelMate 2420. Nothing special, but enough for what I intend to do with it: some light browsing, casual gaming, watching videos, and as a background-music generator.

What I've noticed so far:

• Installing Windows from OEM is a pain in the ass if you don't know which device drivers you're going to need ahead of time.
• If you want to connect to the internet through a router with MAC filtering, be sure you've whitelisted either your eth0 (wired) or wan0 (wireless) MAC address. Or at least spoofed a whitelisted address.
• The BIOS that acer used on this model can boot from a USB drive. However, it recognizes it as a Hard Drive which defaults to a lower priority than the actual disk. Therefore, you have to re-set the boot order each time.
• On an existing Ubuntu install which had been upgraded (9.04 -> 9.10), using the kde-minimal package to try out KDE4 wiped everything from my home folder except for the Pictures directory.
  
• That said, the TravelMate 2420 is capable of running KDE 4 point whatever; with a decent set of visual effect. Which is better than my desktop with a dedicated video card.
• It can also -- according to the upgrade advisor tool -- run Windows 7, with a limited Aero interface. It won't be running it here -- I'd use the money to buy/build a new computer designed for it -- but I could.
• I should have written down my home IP address, I could have pulled some of the music from my home computer to listen to tonight.

This morning, I reinstalled Ubuntu. I wanted to drive the fresh install and take advantage of the encrypted home directory (which I hadn't the first time around). The USB Startup Disk Creator from 9.4 worked smooth as butter, and once I figured out about the BIOS, everything went smooth. Take that back, there was a hiccup with udev when I used the LiveCD ISO. The Alternate installer came out without a hitch. After another 20 minutes worth of updating (including a restart for a new kernel) I'm up and running -- and rebuilding from a week-old backup the one important file I lost from the kde debacle. More later.