A client who owns an Acer 4315-2004 notebook recently asked me if I could fix his troubled computer. His computer which was running Microsoft Vista Home Basic had been trashed by spyware and viruses and was no longer able to connect to the internet and he was unable to check his email. He purchased this unit from a nationally established retail outlet which provided him with no recovery disk for the operating system and no drive disks either. He had been told by the retailer in Florida that he would have to pay a rather large sum of money to get hold of the recovery disk and then the retailer would charge him to reinstall Vista. I attempted to help him but was unable to secure a copy of Vista that worked with his notebook despit the fact that he had a valid license on the machine that was installed by the manufacturer.
 
Tonight I rebuilt his Acer 4315 with Ubuntu 9.04.  I was able to retrieve his personal files because Jaunty Jackalope allows you to mount the existing hard disk and retrieve documents and pictures. A nice feature for the latest Ubuntu release.  Once the original install had completed I was able to connect to my wireless network and finish the install.  My client lives in a remote area where only 56K dialup exists and so I needed to get his internal modem working too. I was able to use the link for the Scanmodem tool found at Linmodems.org.  Scanmodem identified the modem as an Agere Systems modem. I was able to configure the modem, test it and install Gnome PPP. Now my client will be able to connect easily to the local dialup and he'll be virus and spyware free. Once again Ubuntu Linux and open source software have saved the day and in this case saved my client a hefty amount of cash.