I got my laptop last summer from ZaReason. It’s a Strata Pro 13 that came pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 10. Although it does basically work, I’ve had a lot of trouble with it. First of all, I dropped it when it was about a day old. That’s not ZaReason’s fault, but once I sent it back to them it did take them and awfully long time and a lot of pestering from me to get it back to me (the repair wasn’t terribly complicated, only the part of the case that holds the battery was somewhat broken), or give me any status updates about when it would get back to me (something I was naturally concerned about). It was really frustrating to call them up and get these very opaque responses to my questions, even after I had given the order number (the original and the second order, for repair and battery replacement). They’re not a big shop where the person who answers the phone has probably never talked to you or heard of you before, so there’s no reason for this kind of opaqueness.

When it came back, I updated it to Ubuntu 11. After that, it would sit and not boot unless I pressed enter twice. I’m not sure why. I did some work trying to get the bootloader (GRUB) to work better/be clearer about what was going on. That got it to boot on its own some of the time — most of the time at first, but later less and less. This again is probably not ZaReason’s fault, but it was frustrating for a laptop that was supposed to work with Linux to be having issues with bootloader configuration when all I did was update it.

Also, the battery life was very poor. After a while, the battery almost didn’t work. So I contacted them again and they said that it was probably a bad battery and they would send a new one. They did do that fairly quickly and the new one worked. Until recently, when it died at only 9 months old. According to them, it was not under warranty anymore (despite being newer than the computer).

They offered some suggestions to try to improve the charge, including updating the BIOS. I tried all that and it didn’t work so I asked if I should order a new battery, since they had mentioned it could be the motherboard going bad. No response. Which, again…I guess it isn’t their job to tell me when to order a new battery, but it would have been nice to hear “Yes, sorry, we don’t have any more suggestions, would you like us to initiate a new battery order for you?”

I’m also just not wild about the laptop. It was on the expensive side at about $1000, but isn’t incredibly high powered or light. It has sharp edges that are uncomfortable to type on or hold. It’s thick and bulky and even when the battery works, it only lasts 2-3 hours on regular use, which is barely adequate. The dock it came with is awkward to put it into. It doesn’t have a built-in DVD drive (which is why I bought the dock), despite being thick and bulky, and Netflix doesn’t work on it, so my Netflix subscription is useless to it unless it’s docked, which it rarely was when the battery worked. It’s 64-bit Linux so there’s no Amazon downloader (there are ways around this, but it’s still annoying). And I don’t really like the Ubuntu desktop (Unity) which also isn’t ZaReason’s fault, but it does negate some of the benefit of having a Linux distribution pre-installed if it turns out you don’t like its defaults that much anyway.

So personally, although I hope my laptop doesn’t die anytime soon, and that the new battery works, because I’d like to not spend another $700-1000 on a new computer only a year after the last, when it dies I will not mourn it, and I will definitely NOT purchase another laptop from ZaReason, even though I like that they pre-install Linux and I like that they sent me a screwdriver and told me it doesn’t void my warranty to open the case. Good intentions, not so great execution.