About a year ago I purchased a Lenovo laptop. Being a Linux user I installed Linux on it and went along happily until a few months back when I installed the 64 bit version of Ubuntu. Suddenly I felt like a second class citizen. It’s bad enough that some software barely supports Linux but to suddenly have many applications completely unavailable because they’re 32 bit only was too much.

After putting up with this for about a month I decided that I need to switch. My choices were 32 bit Linux or Vista (which the system came with). During the last week I decided I would give Vista a try. The long weekend seemed like the perfect time to make the switch.

Sadly Lenovo don’t provide a restore CD or DVD instead using a protected recovery partition which I had been careful to keep. After starting my laptop I pressed the ThinkVantage button to start the recover process. I selected a complete factory restore using the wizard only to be told that it could not restore my system at the very end. The problems seems to have been caused because it could not find the Windows partition it was expecting.

Personally I always found the idea of a recovery partition to be dangerous at best. What if my hard drive fails? In that situation the last thing I would want to do is fork over more money to Microsoft for an operating system I already owned.

The end result is that I’m still running Ubuntu (the 32 bit version). Most of the applications I require are available again but I’m still without the latest features that Windows user have had for years.

LENOVO YOU SUCK!!

I see James Polley posted about City Rail once again changing how they measure something to make their figure look better instead of solving the problem. I’d like to add last week to the list of complaints. Between 29 December and 2 January (4 working days for me) I was force to put up with City Rail running trains to a Saturday timetable while still feeling they should charge me a peak hour rail fare. If you want to operate an off peak service then try charging for it.