On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Kumaran R <kumaran at kums.in> wrote:
Yesterday I got the pleasure of using one of the TN govt.
laptops. I think we all remember the struggle whch we had to take to
make the laptop a dual-boot one. And it has paid off (atleast
partially.)
Hardware Specs: Intel Pentium Dual Core at 2.3 GHz, 2 GB DDR3 RAM
(upgradable to 8GB), 320 GB Western Digital SATA 2.5" HDD, 14.1"
1366x768 LCD Screen, etc,.
On the whole the laptop doesn't feel cheap. Its light in weight
thanks to the absence of a DVD drive and Wifi. The keyboard is not
upto Lenovo standards, but it is still much better than most laptop
keyboards. I'm typing this email in this keyboard, and it offers good
feedback.. The display is a 14" 1366x768. It has good brightness but
poor viewing angles and lots of glare, thanks to the glossy finish.
The lack of wifi is a huge disappointment. The battery lasted just
under 3 hours (2:58) while doing light web-browsing and playing music
(max. brightness and max. volume). Overall, the design is good with a
good textured feel. It feels solid to hold, and doesn't have lots of
flex.
It has a dual boot with Windows 7 Professional and BOSS
GNU/Linux. I haven't tested Windows 7 much. It has a Office 2010
Starter Edition and Microsoft Security Essentials (I doubt if that is
an anti-virus.) It has few educational apps too. Most of the hard-disk
space (~200 GB) is allocated for it. It logs in by default as a root
user.
The BOSS Linux 4.0, has GNOME 2.30 and OpenOffice.org 3.2. It has
few educational apps like Thirukural and Tamil Keyboard. It also has
the TN govt. textbooks for classes 11 and 12 in .pdf format. I had to
update 8 packages after connecting to the internet. They have just
shifted the top panel to the bottom to make it more "windows-like".
Overall, BOSS works fine and fast.. It has iceweasel and icedove for
web-browsing and mail.
