Update on my eeePC

So a few weeks ago I was working on my eeePC and got some kernel panic warnings and disk read errors. I rebooted to run a full fsck..Sure enough my drive was completely corrupt. I reformatted after playing around with badblocks. Still no joy after that, the drive had a physical problem with it.

I started the somewhat tedious process of sending the netbook in for warranty repairs. I must say that Asus obfuscates the whole process, most likely in hopes that people will simply give up and buy a new laptop. The phone menus were terrible, only after emailing them they told me the right key sequence to push to successfully navigate to the warranty section. The key sequence would have been impossible to get to since it was not advertised by their phone menu. As a guy that occasionally programs auto attendant menus - that's terrible. Fsck that.

The process took about 2 weeks but I got back Friday.

I decided to give openbox + lxde a try, running on the newly released Debian Lenny. So far so good. I ran into an issue with getting wireless going on Lenny final, I had to compile the madwifi source since the open source driver, ath5k did not do what it advertised. I'm not a huge GNU purist so I don't really care.

I'm disappointed to have hardware problems so early in this machine's life..might be just a fluke though.

Comments

colin said…
Do you have a swap partition on your solid state disk? I've SSDs should last like a decade even with fairly aggressive writes, but I don't know if they took into account using one as a swap space.

I think I read Linux really wants a swap partition, so some people running SSDs have set up the swap to go to RAM instead, since your have so much RAM and it is so cheap these days. Can't you also set the aggressiveness of swap usage in Linux as an alternative to putting the swap in RAM?
April 26, 2009 at 8:22 AM
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