After
quite a bit of waiting I finally got my new toy, a
Dell XPS M1330 today (actually yesterday!) and I've spent the last few hours getting it setup and tweaked the way I wanted it. This new Dell replaces the Inspiron 6400 I bought a year ago which I gave back not long after - the ancient Inspiron 8600 I bought in 2004 had better a better resolution (1920x1200).
No photos or anything yet - maybe on the weekend, but I have to admit this is one lightweight baby. The full specifications (stock) is as follows (or for a full listing you can
see my order details). Only the main/relavent bits:
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4Ghz/4Mb)
- WXGA (1280x800) + WLED Display
- 4Gb RAM
- GeForce 8400M 128Mb
- 160Gb 7200RPM HD (149Gb Usable)
- Intel 4965AGN Wireless
- Dell Bluetooth
- 9-Cell battery - so now I have a slight raise and something sticking out at the front...
- x86 Vista Business - heck +$20 for another copy of Vista? Why not!
- Fingerprint Reader
- Tuxedo Black
The last two items in that list was the cause of much of the delay, with the former causing a 2 week holdup. I admit though biometrics is still a "toy" for notebook but I like toys. All up I paid about $2480 for it (down from a build price of $3039), the addition of the 24" for a friend at work got that to the $3000 mark with additional warranty.
So why is this lappy decked out with bling bling? It will hopefully be another "long-term lappy" (I spent close to $4500 on the Inspiron 8600 back in 2004, and its lasted me quite a bit!) so this fill the void where you need something lightweight and yet fast and can handle the grunt. I have to warn you though, *DO NOT GET FOOLED* and get the SoundBlaster Audigy HD upgrade, I mistakenly added it thinking I'd get onboard Audigy processing but instead its a lame software package which runs EAX processing via the C-Media processor. Co-incidentally if you look around you'll find its
freely downloadable from Dell's website (see note below). *rolls-eyes*
While I admit I find Dell Monitors (240x/270x) and Dell lappy's (Inspiron/XPS) quite good (keyboard, design, build, warranty/service, pricing to a certain degree) I find their installations ridiciously bloated. Symantec, Google Desktop, Roxio and all sorts of other crapola Dell seems to install unecessarily. So the very first thing I do is to do a clean install of Windows.
So the next few posts I'll show you how to get Vista x64 working on M1330 (I've got Vista x64 SP1 running successfully on x64 right now) its about 1am and I need some sleep... After that, time to dual boot it with Gutsy when that goes final in a couple of weeks (cant wait!). My initial attempt to use Feisty LiveCD failed to load the deskop environment (probably something to do with the NVIDIA driver), I'm sure Fail-Safe mode would be OK.
EDIT: Sorry I pasted the wrong link for the Audigy software.
Download the
Audigy 2 Driver for Vista (or
Windows XP) and the
Audigy 2 Applications for XP. Granted they are for the
XPS M1710 it worked fine when I installed it (though, no fix for x64).