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I have an Acer Ferrari 4005 laptop. I got it to process hi-def video -- sometimes with Windows software, but happily, the drive is large enough for an Ubuntu partition, which is what I expect to use most of the time.

I'm located in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.

<rich AT FullLoon DOT com>

Some additional notes about running Ubuntu on the 4005

• If you want to keep the ability to dual boot on the machine, you can install Ubuntu on the partition that Acer ships as the D:\ drive. You'll have to pick the manual partitioning option during the install. When GRUB is installed it will offer to give you the option to boot into the remaining Windows partition. Windows will have one problem when you run it -- a program called eRecovery will try to access the D:\ drive and will run the CPU useage up to 100%. To clobber it -- and to disable automatic backups of Windows data -- fire up regedit then dig down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Run \ erecoveryservice and just delete it. Thanks to http://crippledcanary.se/archives/7 for this tip.

• Even after installing the bcm43xx driver instructions here the WiFi in my machine is very fussy. For a while I used the wifi-radar package (available by Synaptic or apt-get after you've enabled 'Universe'). WiFi Radar at least gives a nice signal strength display of the WiFi signals in the area.

• I've had recurring troubles with the Ferrari power supply. (LED in the power button lights, CPU fan runs, hard drive and DVD drive spin up, but little else works.) So far it's made 4 trips back to Texas for repairs. Fortunately, they've all been covered by Acer. A distant friend with a different Acer model has also had power troubles. You've been warned.
• If you plan to run Blender you'll need to install ATI's fglrx drivers -- Blender will run when the open source api driver is in use, but clicking the right mouse button gives the wrong results -- very frustrating!