I did buy a Mac. I love it and have now bought 2 more for my daughters. It is expensive, but not having to fix things all the time is worth the price. Macs work and they work well.

Culture Shock Live 05 from WessexAnarchist on Vimeo.

1. You can now install it all from Synaptic (unless you really need/want the latest).
2. You no longer need stalonetray as there is now a good notification area (systray) applet - although you wont be able to enable this until you have either removed the top gnome-panel or removed all systray items from the panel.
3. The recycle bin applet also works properly now!
4. I couldn’t seem to drag icons from my gnome-panel bar onto the awn doc. However right clicking a menu item in the awn dock now has an ‘add to bar’ item
5. The Awn Log Out applet does not give you the option to log out, only shutdown, hibernate etc. This is due to the (annoying) way that Jaunty separates the shutdown and log out menus. The solution is to create  a launcher in ‘dock preferences’ call it Log Out, choose an icon and then use the command ‘gnome-session-save –kill’ (without the quotes)
6. Next problem is how to remove the top gnome-panel. The Sessions Manager is greatly changed in Jaunty and you can’t now remove the panel from here. Here’s how to do it:
   1. In a terminal type gconf-editor
   2. Navigate to desktop/gnome/session
   3. Right-click on required_components_list
   4. remove the panel!
   5. Log out and back in again and your panel is gone

When running ‘Disk Cleanup’ on a Windows 2000 or XP workstations, you may have notice that it pauses for a long time when checking for files to be compressed. One of things you can to do to save time is to edit the registry file to automatically bypass this step in Disk Cleanup. This is good if you already know that you won’t be using the Compress Old Files feature and just need to clean up unnecessary files.

1. Click on Start > Run > Regedit (or Regedt32.exe)

2. Backup your current registry. To do this, click on File > Export and enter a name. (I suggest using the date as part of your name, as in backup-reg-mar-3-2003)

3. After you have backed up your registry, drill down as follows:
HKey Local Machine > Software > Microsoft > Windows > Current Version > Explorer > Volume Caches > Compress Old Files

4. In the right hand pane, double click on the REG_SZ (default) variable to edit it

5. A window pops up that will have a long string of characters in the Value Data field:
B50F5260-0C21-11D2-AB56-00A0C9082678

6. Press DEL to remove (clear out) the value data field, then click OK and then exit the RegEdit program. Note: we are NOT deleting the actual key, just the value assigned to the key!

7. That’s it, and you don’t even have to reboot!

That gets me to my point about why I won’t buy or recommend Dell any more, these are my reasons:

• If you do have a problem with your Dell, you will find, by ‘Googling’, that many other people have the same issue. You will also find that, in most cases, Dell really don’t seem to care about these problems and will resist admitting that it could possibly be anything to do with them.
• Although they sell laptops with Ubuntu, they will not provide any Linux drivers for their printers! What’s that all about?
• They do not support XP on their latest models. Yet if you search you will find hundreds of posts from people who are upgrading their laptops from Vista to XP (yes I do mean upgrading). Not only are Dell not meeting their customers’ needs by refusing to supply their laptops with XP, they are also not helping customers who have chosen to upgrade to XP themselves as they are not releasing XP compatible drivers for many of their later laptops. This shows a complete disregard to the needs of customers purchasing their hardware. I’m not saying that Dell are alone in this, I’m sure many of the other laptop manufacturers are just as bad, but my experience has been with Dell, (& I’ve used Dell a lot in the past & always recommended them) & so that is what I am writing about. Not releasing drivers for XP is acceptable if new driver releases are to add extra functionality, but usually they aren’t, they are to fix bugs - it is unacceptable to not release compatible drivers which fix bugs. By not supplying laptops with XP & not supporting XP with bugfix driver releases for later models, Dell are restricting the freedom of their customers to use the hardware in their own way & forcing them to accept either compromised functionality, or forcing them to use an inferior operating system - Vista has been slated widely & most experienced computer users do not want to use it, it is probably the worst thing Microsoft have released since ME (it may even be worse).

So what are my annoying niggles on the Studio 1535 - the onboard mic doesn’t work with the XP drivers, this renders the onboard webcam practically useless. The touchpad is slow & occasionally jerky, this problem has been reported widely by many users & occurs on Vista & XP - search the web for this one, you will find Dell in complete denial about it!

These niggles are not a big issue for me. I got a good deal on the machine & have a good spec for the price. The webcam was an extra, it being useless because of the mic isn’t too much of a problem for me. The touchpad problem I can get around, by selecting ‘enhance pointer precision’ in control panel, it stops the occasional jerkiness, at the expense of making it a bit slower & I can plug in an external wireless mouse. But, what this has highlighted for me is Dell’s attitude - ‘just give us your money and put up with the problems’. It’s not good enough Dell, so that’s the end of it for me. Next time I’ll probably pay over the odds & buy a Mac!