I originally bought my XPS m1330n because I wanted to have a secondary laptop to keep in sync with my primary (HP dv9000t custom build).

I chose Dell (after some research), because I wanted to support them supporting Linux (with money, as in buying their products). The best way to encourage more companies to offer other Operating Systems as a choice is to buy those products.

You can read my review of the version of Linux that came preinstalled from Dell, Ubuntu 7.10.

The short version is: Love the hardware, 7.10 is a terrible piece of junk, 8.0.4.1 is actually fairly decent (though I still personally can't stand Gnome, that's just a personal preference).

The system, hardware-wise has been trouble free, or so I thought.

In the first week of September, I installed (dual boot), OpenSuse 11.0 (retail DVD), I wanted to evaluate it.

I was at the time running Ubuntu 8.0.4 (shortly thereafter upgraded to Dell variant 8.0.4.1) on the Dell, and OpenSuse 10.3 (Retail DVD) on my HP (With triple boot for the XP and Vista that it came with, I only use them when trying to help support Windows users, I have not needed to boot to either to do ANY of my work in years fortunately).

Ever since Novell acquired Suse, they have had an unpleasant tendency to have at least the first two released be buggy as heck (.0 and .1 for example). With improvements being decent by .2 or .3.

I figured it might be the same with 11.0, so did not want to "bite the bullet" yet in switching over to it.

I like overall Suse's superior hardware support, especially on laptops. I haven't found a single distro does has as up to date and vast hardware support for laptops than Suse for the last several years, though I'm always checking (see the previous reviews on many other distros on the techtalkhawke.com website).

However, Suse is now quite bloated and relatively slow compared to other distros (maybe an unavoidable trade-off, but I'm not so convinced about that), of course, like any Linux distro, it can be leaned up, if one wants to put up with the time to remove packages, deal with dependencies, and recompile the kernel. Which I frequently do, but would not recommend for the "average" user. However, 10.3 has made many a home user, small business, and corporate user happy "as is" despite the bloat.

One key thing to note is that if you just use the "official" repositories, it will remain stable, but add in all the other "community" repos (as I do), then it has some degredation in stability since those are more bleeding edge. At least there is lots of choice. I have noted the same thing with the Ubuntu (and other) communities, if I stick witht he "official" but much more limited (than Suse) software options/repos, the performance and stability is good, but degrades very quickly when adding the others. This is of course logical, just something I wish to point out to anyone who might not have a lot of experience yet in the Linux world, and might not realize the consequences of such choices (besides legal issues).

The review of 11.0 will be coming up soon.

Meanwile, back to the Dell.

After I installed 11.0 it started popping up errors with SMART warnings (hard drive) that my HD was failing!

Why hadn't Ubuntu told me?

I checked, it never installed smartctl, in fact, I couldn't get it in the core repo's, I had to add the other repos' to even have it as an option to install. As soon as I did, if I ran smartctl -H /dev/sda, sure enough, it indicated status "FAILED", and "FAILING NOW". But still no pop-ups, etc. letting me know.

I contacted Dell through their chat.

The Dell folks eventually called me (from India), and asked me to run the Dell diagnostics in addition to the SMART test results I gave them (which clearly indicated failure).

This took up quite a bit of time _________________________--

(Come back and put the log details from that support time here)

)_)))))))))))________________--

But it wasn't "terrible" just "average", and I expected far better from Dell from my previous years with them.

The replacement drive arrived )_)______________--

I swapped it out.

Up and running.

INstalled ubuntu (And later suse 11.0).

All was well, or so I thought.

A few days later, by the end of the week (my birthday), SMART was saying intermittentlyt he drive was failing (Again, Suse was proactive in letting me know, Ubuntu was not).

Shutdown improperly Friday?

Sunday wouldn't power on until fully disassembled....

Log from more recent incident......

Now waiting for call from support onsite technician on scheduling....