Freespire 1.0 Review

The proprietary video drivers work wonderfully -- the Intel Extreme Graphics on my TravelMate had direct rendering enabled by default, as did the ATI Radeon X700 on my desktop test machine. What really blew me away wasn't the graphics drivers, though -- it was the wireless network drivers. Freespire includes not only the Atheros (madwifi) drivers, but also Centrino wireless drivers and the NDISwrapper utility, pre-stocked with 26 Windows wireless network drivers. Freespire 1.0 was the first operating system I have ever installed -- Windows included -- on this Acer machine without having to go to great lengths to get the integrated wireless card working. I had wireless Internet access by default. The only consistent problem I had with wireless connectivity was the crappy Connection Manager applet. If I closed the lid on the Acer laptop (this only shuts the screen off -- ACPI isn't fully supported on the TravelMate 2300 yet) and put it on the floor next to my chair, I would come back to it later and find that the wireless connection had gone away. Nothing I could do from Connection Manager or the command line could bring the network up again. The best I could do was shut the computer down, wait a few minutes, then start up again.