Nov 09
25
Ubuntu Booted via USB on a cheap Toshiba Laptop
I play around on my wife’s laptop from time to time, but hardly ever use it for anything constructive. This is mainly because I don’t want to load it down with a bunch of development tools and things that she’ll never use. I bought the laptop for her, so the fewer things I can use it for the better for my sake 
With that said, I have been curious how well Ubuntu 9.10 would work on it. I was going to try the LiveCD, but that is kind of an unfair way to judge performance. I have a 250Gb portable hard drive I use as a secondary backup for files. It also normally acts as my save folder on my desktop for anything I would rather not lose. I’d considered installing Ubuntu on it as a USB startup drive, but was reluctant because of some problems I’ve read about Ubuntu killing USB drives (although I’m fairly certain those were flash drives and this portable drive actually uses a laptop hdd).
Once I had finally given up on trying Ubuntu on the laptop, my mother-in-law sent us one of her care packages and it had a 16Gb thumb drive in it (Thanks!). She does that sometimes, which is cool. She normally, knowing I’m a geek, puts something techy in there for me (she actually sent the 250Gb portable in a previous package). Once I had finally given up on trying Ubuntu on the laptop, I had a way to safely test it without worry about killing my drive!
So, here I am, typing this blog on my wife’s laptop, running Ubuntu from a flash drive, connected to my wireless network, and no worry of doing any damage when I’m finished. The performance, you ask? Awesome. This is a cheap laptop, which runs Windows 7 Home Premium flawlessly, and I like the way Ubuntu runs on it even better. The sound is actually louder and clearer, the touch pad mouse is extremely sensitive (in comparison), and I’ve noticed a flaw in the laptop I’d hadn’t noticed on Windows: the touch pad is little too far to the left. They centered the touch pad to the QWERTY section of the keyboard, which means the way my left hand normally sits over the keyboard the edge of the my left thumb taps the touch pad and moves the mouse. On Windows the touch pad isn’t as sensitive, so I never realized the position of the touch pad wasn’t centered to the entire keyboard. Perhaps that is a standard which I never noticed before, I haven’t used laptops very often without a touchscreen (which is at work).