About ready to buy a Dell laptop, any input?

digitalwanderer

digitalwanderer

wandering
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Inspiron 1705

-Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5200 (1.60GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533 MHz FSB)
-Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
-Express Upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium from XP Media Center Edition
-17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
-1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
-120GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
-24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive
-256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory
-Integrated Sound Blaster® Audigy™ HD Software Edition
-80 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
-Intel PRO/Wireless 3945a/g
-Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate)

-FREE Dell Color Ink Jet Printer 725

$1,352.56 after taxes and shipping

Yes/no?

My wife has her heart set on a 17", so please don't tell me to get a 15.4. ;)
 
Woke up this morning to my wife yelling at me for not ordering her laptop yet, her PC died this morning from a fatal hard drive...... :LOL:
 
digitalwanderer said:
Inspiron 1705

-Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5200 (1.60GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533 MHz FSB)
-Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
-Express Upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium from XP Media Center Edition
-17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
-1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
-120GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
-24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive
-256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory
-Integrated Sound Blaster® Audigy™ HD Software Edition
-80 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
-Intel PRO/Wireless 3945a/g
-Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate)

-FREE Dell Color Ink Jet Printer 725

$1,352.56 after taxes and shipping

Yes/no?

My wife has her heart set on a 17", so please don't tell me to get a 15.4. ;)
Click to expand...

We're in the same conundrum actually. I'd upgrade the HD from 5400rpm to 7200rpm. She'll definitely notice the bump in application load time and file accessing. Other than that, I think you're set.
 
Appreciate the input Nate, but my wife rejected the 7200 bump anyway when I tried to talk her into it.

Dell wanted too much for it anyways, I'll just get a 7200 when the 5400 fails. ;)

(I have very little faith in laptop HDs.)
 
digitalwanderer said:
(I have very little faith in laptop HDs.)
Click to expand...
They are on average better than desktop HDDs, considering that they are much smaller and what they go through. ;)

If you have a good laptop, it's encased in a rubber shock-proof sleeve. And in industrial computers, they use almost exclusively laptop harddisks nowadays, in a spring suspension enclosure.
 
Really? Damn, my own limited experience with them must not be representative then. :???:

I've personally never had a problem with a laptop HD and I've had a 30Gb 4200 in an external enclosure that I've been abusing for a few years now and it still works great, I only recently had to deal with two dead laptop HDs of my friend MauiMom.

Her Toshiba's HD died and I had to swap it out a couple of weeks ago, and she just asked me to take a look at her USB drive the other day and it's dead as a doornail. :(

I'll take your word for it though DiGuru, you know more about this than me....besides, it means I might not have my HD in the new laptop die. ;)

Did I mention I already figured out the new laptop's name? (I name all my systems, I'm weird that way)

"Bertha", it's just too fitting. :cool:
 
The thing that goes wrong with laptop disks most often, is that they get locked in their arm "rest". When the drive isn't reading or writing data, the arms that carries the read/write heads are stored away in a safe, shockproof place. They can get stuck there, for example after being thrown on the table a bit too hard. You can hear that, as the drive will noticeably click once or a few times after connecting the power, and nothing else happens.

So, if you want it to live long and happily, be gentle with the laptop. ;)
 
DiGuru said:
The thing that goes wrong with laptop disks most often, is that they get locked in their arm "rest". When the drive isn't reading or writing data, the arms that carries the read/write heads are stored away in a safe, shockproof place. They can get stuck there, for example after being thrown on the table a bit too hard. You can hear that, as the drive will noticeably click once or a few times after connecting the power, and nothing else happens.
Click to expand...
You described EXACTLY the problem with the laptop HD I had to replace.

I'll make sure Bertha is handled carefully, thanks for the warning. :)

Damn it, is it next year yet? I'm all ready to get this thing and start playing! :LOL:
 
how easy is it to work on/upgrade a laptop? still basically plug and play? case opens easily? can you get laptop components fairly readily?
 
Cartoon Corpse said:
how easy is it to work on/upgrade a laptop? still basically plug and play? case opens easily? can you get laptop components fairly readily?
Click to expand...

Extremely dependent on the model. Some laptops include ways to upgrade the video (the vast majority don't from my experience), replacing the processor can be a chore and you have to be careful the motherboard will work with it, and memory and hard drive being easily replaceable. Most of the time I've found upgrading laptops besides the hard drive and memory rather pointless, to get a performance improvement besides those two areas generally is not very cheap and therefore I'd simply suggest buying a new one. That's also why I tend to shy away from "gaming" laptops, they're a large and sometimes (upgrade wise) cumbersome investment.
 
w00t-w00t-w00t-w00t-w00t-w00t-w00t-w00t!!!!
w00t.gif


Turns out it shipped yesterday and is currently about 20 miles from here scheduled for delivery tomorrow.

Pretty pathetic that I used Google maps to figure out how far it actually was, but I'm a bit excited about this. :LOL:
 
Congrats on the purchase. I have been personally holding out for the Santa Rosa platform due Q2 2k7 as I understand. FSB bumped up to 800 Mhz up from 667, 2.4 ghz clock, 64 bit capability, Robson cache support, and hopefully a geforce 8800 go to pair iwth that...mmhmm! Tax rebate here I come!
 
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