My work laptop is an nc8430 (about 4 years old)
For i while i dual booted my work windows with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is nice, but it didn't give me enough to completely switch over.
Then i came into contact with Linux mint (Thank you Linux Format !)
My experience was great, everything worked out of the box !
No codecs and other tools needed to be installed afterwards. Just simply GREAT !
It didn't take long for me to take the decision. Linux mint 8 was installed next to my windows and Ubuntu.
We were already using Openoffice and Thunderbird so the switchover was not that big a deal.
My files are on an ancrypted disk-volume that can easily be mounted with almost every OS so my files and folders were also not a problem.
With the ntlmaps i am able to connect to the AD and use our proxy server without a lot of logging in. (Thanks Tim Lloyd !)
After running this setup for a few months now i found that i got used to the responsiveness of the system.
I had to start up my windows to start up a windows only program.
This was a *very* frustrating experience. My own box which responded very quickly with mint turned into a very,very slow system on windows, sigh.
Now Linux mint 9 is released and i was checking it out.
Running mint 9 from an usb key gave me an display with interference that was not good.
Every once and a while the dancing stopped but this was just too frustrating to work with.
Looking for a solution I ran a query and found a article that mentioned the vmem=256 option for the kernel
So i started up, pressed 'e' in the grub and added the vmem=256 and..... PRESTO the display was stable !
I have to put this into the grub standard options so i do not have to edit this every time i start up, but that shouldn't be a problem.
edit: After a while the vibrations on the screen are back, only stopping every now and then. very annoying. Needs more attention.