After waiting for the initial hysteria to die down and having not seen any negative reports about the upgrade, I finally pressed the button and let the laptop upgrade while I went to the gym. I’d already upgraded my AMD64 desktop, but the laptop is really my main workhorse and so I tend to be slightly more conservative about what I do with it. Any fears turned out to be unfounded.

The upgrade went smoothly, but as always it was the small things that tripped me up.

  • My freenode script for XChat had spanish characters in it – which meant that XChat wasn’t initially happy loading it.
  • The mdns annoyance that David Welton found (thanks!).

However, after a reboot all is well and the machine now seems to be running smoothly. The new battery is giving me around 2 hours of battery life (a huge improvement on the 40 mins I had) and so all is looking good.

The desktop effects work, but I’m not sure that they add enough for me to keep. They don’t seem to slow down the machine as much as I thought they might, so for now they’ll stay on and I’ll think again and review in a few days.

UPDATE totem really doesn’t seem to like the desktop effects, so I’ve disabled them as I often use the laptop to view movies.

Overall another easy upgrade, although this time without any huge changes, or none that I’ve yet to come across.