My friend wanted a low cost Laptop and went for Dell 1525. Here in Singapore, it is really a value for money Notebook. Everything is OK with this Laptop, just one issue- It has Vista Basic. We discussed his problem and came with two possible alternatives:

1. Downgrade to XP SP3 ( which is blazingly fast compared to Vista). This was the most obvious option and a good one too as Dell is known to provide drivers for XP and my friend would have an OS he is very comfortable with. However, there is one problem - MS allows downgrade only for Vista Ultimate and Business editions. That means that my friend has to BUY XP.

My friend had almost given up. It was then that I pitched in and suggested him to give Mandriva 2008 Spring a try. Now he is not afraid of Linux and said that if all the peripherals worked good and the speed is better than Vista, he will consider Ubuntu. His rationale was based on tha fact that Dell officially ships the same Laptop "Inspiron 1525" with Ubuntu pre-installed in US so Ubuntu should have no problem on this one too. I reminded myself that Ubuntu is the most dominant Distro, but the trouble was that I had to download the Ubuntu LiveCD, whereas I had Mandriva 2008 Spring One on a CD. So we decided to download Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS on my Laptop and in the meanwhile try Mandriva on his Dell.

Good thing for me is that Mandriva One is an excellent flavor of Linux.