Most things just seem to work on my new Lenovo Thinkpad E145 laptop - but, as always, some things just do not work out of the box. Problems with WIFI are almost expected, but not being able to boot from USB is plain weird.
The <Fn> key on this laptop is at the place most experienced keyboard users would expect the <Ctrl> key to be.
Solution
You can swap both keys around by a BIOS setting. This may be a bit confusing for others who want to use your computer, though. This also works properly in Linux.
Function keys do not seem to work properly. Perhaps they so very unexpected things. This may be very disconcerting if you interrupt normal startup by pressing <enter> and then are unable to select one of the menu options.
Solution
You have to press the <Fn>-button at the same time as the function key in order to use it as a function key.
You can switch this behaviour around by setting a BIOS option.
When having replaced your internal laptop disk, already preloaded with Linux, you can not boot it; if you select it in the boot menu, nothing seems to happen and you return to the boot menu almost immediately.
Solution
We have to disable Secure Boot and enable Legacy Boot.
Procedure
Enter the BIOS setup (from the boot menu, you can under App Menu select Setup).
About a year ago, I replaced the hard disk in my laptop by a solid state disk. As expected, the difference was remarkable: even though the laptop still had the same relatively slow processor, it felt a lot snappier. Starting up and shutting down only took ten, fifteen seconds, instead of more than a minute, for example. A very nice upgrade.
I have been a content user of the Asus EEE series up until now. My latest laptop was a Asus EEE 1015PE. I am a heavy user, though - not in the sense that I run very heavy processes on it (it is not really suited for that), but in the sense that I carry it almost always with me and that it is multiple hours a day in use. You can clearly see that: my old laptop was battered and has had multiple repairs (these last months, I opened it up at least every fortnight - and it was clearly not made to suffer such indignities). Minor issues began to compound, until I really had no choice.
