This is all obviously anecdotal but one would assume Windows would be #1 priority for hardware vendors to test against as it's the most popular platform. Micro

This is all obviously anecdotal but one would assume Windows would be #1 priority for hardware vendors to test against as it's the most popular platform. Microsoft also has WHQL which helps to some degree in ensuring quality. I can't imagine an x86 laptop vendor not testing their hardware with Windows but I can definitely imagine them not testing Ubuntu. In terms of recovering from faults Windows is much easier for me which isn't surprising since I've been using Windows for a long time. I find things like the Device Manager to be more user friendly than looking at kernel logs. (I also have an external WD drive, no problems) EDIT: By the way power management in Ubuntu on this laptop is all broken as well. It doesn't detect closing the lid, I have to go through some voodoo sequence to get it to sleep.