Nothing and More

• Nvidia Quadro 1000M
• Intel i7-2720QM @ 2.20GHz
• 8GB DDR3 PC3-10600
• Seagate 500GB 7200 rpm
• 15.6″ (396mm) FHD (1920×1080) color, anti-glare, LED backlight, 270 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio, 95% Gamut
• Intel 6205 Wireless Card
• 2xUSB 3.0
• 1xUSB 2.0
• 1xeSata/USB 2.0
• Display Port
• VGA Port
• Fingerprint Reader

I ditched Windows 7 Professional, after verifying all was well. I tried three Linux distros:

• ArchLinux
• Fedora 15
• Ubuntu 11.04

For installation I recommend to change the Video Card in the Bios to Integrated, and disable Optimus OS Compatibility Check. Optimus doesn’t work out of the box in Linux, there is work in progress in this front, but nothing stable yet.

I didn’t have any issues with the install process, after the install is completed you can switch to the Discrete option.  There are reports of problems using the Discrete card in Ubuntu, some users have reported hangs, while changing the screen brightness, I tried to reproduce it, and it hanged having no other option than doing a forceful shutdown, so tread carefully.

Fedora 15 has the best Power Management, you can use PowerTop to tweak PM in all three distributions, but Fedora gave me the best results, extending the battery life considerably.

With Fedora 15 battery life, during normal use for me was of approx. 6:15 hours, while with Ubuntu it was approx. 5:00 hours. The reason for this disparity is that the Fedora team has done a lot of work on PM, and it shows. I could have gotten even better results, had I disabled Bluetooth and put the Wireless card in PM saving mode. I didn’t run this test with Archlinux, because of time constraints.

On the Thermal side of things, it runs quite cool, It’s super quiet, CPU Scaling works out of the box, and it’s very efficient.

USB 3.0: don’t have usb 3.0 devices, but 2.0 works fine in this ports, with the exception of the Ipod Touch, which charges but it’s not mounted.

eSata: Ordered an external drive, will report when it arrives.

mSata: It’s my understanding that you can set a mSata drive as the main disk, and your internal drive a secondary. I will try this once I get my hands on a mSata drive.

Raid: Raid is not supported on my machine, it seems they use a different chipset for the machines with Raid capability, so if that’s important for you then you should order with the Raid option enabled. However you can still install a secondary drive on the DVD bay (with the optional cage) and it’s recognized.

WWLAN: There are reports on the web, that it works well, but I haven’t tested.

Express Card: Don’t own one.

I upgraded my bios from the default v.1.0.6 to the latest v.1.0.25 (which is really v.1.0.24) and it caused a few issues with ACPI in Linux, mainly none of the distros I tried with Kernel 2.6.38 or 2.6.39 could handle this changes. I didn’t try with the latest Vanilla Kernel. The upgraded Bios caused no issues in Win 7 Pro.

The issue is not present on prior Bios releases, so I’m using 1.0.22 which works fine on all the tested distros.