It has been about three months since I purchased my BigLap and started a new job that sees me working like a gypsy floating from place to place as long as it has wireless Internet. My laptop goes everywhere slung on my back and has worked perched on a knee at conferences, sticky tables at cafes, late nights in hotel rooms, and at my parent’s dining room table while my daughter tugs at my sleeve. It feels as necessary as my wallet and keys and I feel a little naked if it isn’t on me.

So how has it performed? Unbelievably. I’ve owned a number of laptops from Toshiba, Dell, and Sony and out of all of them this has been the best build quality and features for the price.

• Battery life is solid
• Light for being a 17″
• Screen hinges are stiff
• Keyboard responsive and quiet
• Rugged design

Tech support from ZaReason has been equally great with quick response times with a genuinely conversational and friendly tone. They have worked hard to make sure that as much of the hardware is operational with the shipping version of Ubuntu. The built in webcam is the only piece that has given me problems in that the image displayed is upside down and cannot seem to be flipped but that is more a problem with the device and the driver.

segue/

After actually putting five minutes of work into researching the solution it is now fixed…

Gratefully cribbed from 0graham0′s post over at Ubuntu forums…

sudo mkdir /etc/camdriver

Download the driver from Sourceforge extract it and run the following…

sudo make
sudo modprobe videodev
sudo modprobe v4l1-compat
sudo insmod stk11xx.ko vflip=1

Add the following to /etc/modules

videodev
v4l1-compat

and to /etc/rc.local

insmod /etc/camdriver/stk11xx.ko vflip=1

Viola!

/segue

The great thing about ZaReason though is that they never dropped the issue and had emailed me possible solutions and are very receptive if you happen to stumble on one of your own and that level of service is what makes the company so great.

Bottom line: I love this laptop and I really love this company.