This is the review of my first personal machine that I own thus the review is not relative to the other options in the market. Also, it's pretty detailed with how and for what reasons I chose the configuration that I finally went for. I've put up ads which I'll later replace with the photos of my new machine once i get them developed. Till then...bear with me:).I took a long time trying to figure out which machine would work the best for me as technology advances rapidly and you know it'd be stupid to wait for the best but you do want to strike a perfect note at sometime. Also I'm a techie and do a lot of experimentation and R&D with new technologies which complicated the task of making the right decision. I compile Firefox with Visual Studio .net regularly for testing and deploying at my organisation (though it's yet to be approved as a standard application). Apart from that, I rip music, videos, burn CDs and DVDs use system heavy utilities like 7zip to backup my data. And I used to do all this simultaneously, 7zip, VirtualDub, Firefox compilation all at the same time. For such varied tasks, and heavy multi-tasking, not to mention the demands of the upcoming Vista, I wished a desktop with Pentium Extreme Edition. Well, no more as I realised, the era and utility was of a power-packed notebook which I could take with me instead of ending the task running on it, have my tools and data etc. handy , to work from anywhere as per my mood while also having a machine which could take any task I could throw at it . Since scalability would be a concern with a notebook, the one I would go for should be high enough in configuration so as not to go performance-redundant as compared to other budget notebooks.
My first target was the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi, for its configuration, I could get performance I wanted at the right price… until I found out that this model was no more available in the Indian market. Tried reaching
Tigerdirect.com and
newegg.com, but they don't ship to India (may be because of some US export regulations). The Acer marketing head in India gave me a thumbs down (which did turn me down) and that's was when I looked forward to Dell, a renowned and respected PC assembler, and a client I worked indirectly for as a tech support personnel. I remembered the time when I only used to hear complaints about Dell machines during our 24x7 operations which made me a little insecure. The decision however, was made considering the reputation of Dell and the fact that such a large business would certainly invite some bad stories from the customer, and bad stories spread faster than the admirations. My initial choice was a Latitude which later changed to Dell Precision M90. The reasons were quite a few: -
It's a workstation. It uses high end dedicated graphics. Supports duo core. It Is vista capable. Supports dual channel DDR RAM up to 4GB. Uses SATA HDD up to 120Gb @ 5400 RPM or 100Gb @7200 RPM. Features the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) technology. Is large with a 17" screen, conclusively it would be airy inside the lower part and would probably run cooler if left running as a Desktop. This is a wide format screen with 16:10 display aspect ratio. Features great connectivity. Can work longer for all the heavy tasks you throw at it with the 9-cell 85 WHr battery. Features magnesium-alloy casing and steel hinges that add durability. Features patented Dell StrikeZone technology that absorbs all the shocks to the HDD if you place it on a hard and plain but bumpy surface. The configuration I finally went for was: -
CPU: - T2500 Duo Core 2GHz RAM: - 2Gb @ 677 MHz HDD: - 100Gb @ 7200 RPM (Hitachi) GPU: - nVidia Quadro FX 1500M. OpenGL. Screen: - 17" WUXGA 1920x1200 px. OS: -Windows XP Pro. Sp2. The Centrino Duo label from Intel meant that Wi-Fi connectivity was already present and was not optional but came as a part of the package. Bluetooth 8x DVD+/-RW combo drive with support for dual layer DVD burning. This is region protected wherein the region can be changed up to five times. Don't bother to change the region yet, use a utility like DVD Region+CSS Free. By the time I ended up configuring this machine I realised that I was going to be on a tight budget for sometime after purchasing this little beast of a notebook J. I also realised that Intel would soon release T2700 ( 2.3GHz, it'd already be there in the market by the time you read this) and once Core Duo 2 comes up, the prices for Core Duo will shatter down like anything. And as per my research I understand that the pins of T2700 would be compatible with that of T2500, so T2500 would do for now and I can upgrade later for cheap, if at all required.
I went for 1Gb of RAM while configuring this machine, but soon I realised I was being careless and negligent because my office machine about 600Mb RAM during my regular duty hours and uses about 1Gb while I'm compiling Firefox alongside; (the Visual Studio linker saps about 500-700Mb if I use compiler optimisations "-Ox -GAF7s -GL -arch:SSE2" and "-ltcg" linker options). So…phew! ... 2Gb is what I'd need, and then I could even do without a pagefile at all. Too good.
HDD had to be a 100Gb and fast enough for read write operations as I'm a music enthusiast to the heart and of course a heavy multi-tasker to demand 7200RPM.
GPU could actually be done away with as I hate games (why in the world would someone play games on a machine which can be utilised for endless possibilities! And that too on a computer? No way, I'd rather go for a console and attach it to my TV. But gamers anyways have the last word. Even the purchase of an ace performer can be justified while playing performance demanding games.) Well at the most I needed a dedicated 256Mb GPU and that would do for me.
I was not really sure I'd go for a WUXGA screen at 17" of a size but I went for it anyways (this was a risk which I took). And I was lucky as it turned out to be good.
A DVD writer without dual layer burning support or even a CD only writer would be a waste of money. I couldn't do without an 8x DVD+/-RW combo drive with support for dual layer DVD burning.
After several modifications to my quotation which went back and forth between me and the sales rep, I finally ordered it. The estimated time of delivery in India is 15 days. So what do you do when you've paid such a huge amount for something that is not yet with you…? Well you pray and wonder and read reviews all the day, check the status hourly on the Dell website, call customer service for the smallest of reasons and pray after reading all the horror tails of unsatisfied customers that the system that you get is in good shape and up to the mark as expected.
There was a disconnect between the manufacturing unit and the customer service as per the status of the order. I waited… 1st day, 2nd, day, 3rd day, 4th, 5th,6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th. Finally I could live it no more and planned to express my concern to the customer service. It was a Tuesday I remember. The lady assured me the delivery the next Tuesday. Guess what, she was wrong and apparently confused as I got a call from the delivery vendor verifying my presence at my address. That last hour was the most killing of all.
There were two boxes, and they could have weighed about 10Kgs in all as I tried to make sure that I don't drop any of these. I put them on the floor and opened the first one. Well there was a neatly packed nylon backpack to carry the notebook. At the time of ordering I just went with whatever the sales gentleman recited out for these inconsequensive accessories. Well, I didn't like it by the looks and the fact that it was made up of nylon. I'd rather buy a leather carry-case in the near future.
Now that the first box failed to make and good impression and blow of my imaginations, I decided to open the second box. Ah, there was some nesting there; the second box carried a third box which was pretty heavy say like about 5kgs. That sure would be the machine and I carefully lifted the bag and put it on my bed just to make sure that I don't pull out the machine and put it on a hard surface (you go nuts when you do all this). The packaging was very good and durable; I bet I could have thrown that box from 10ft (had it contained stones) without breaking down anything. It's an experience getting a Dell machine out of the box, every thing delicately packed in and everything came out elegantly with a virgin surface. Hah, the time to open the lid had come.
Well, I'm not used to laptops and I for a moment wondered where to find the push-button or a slider to lift the lid open. Ah, there right in the centre of the face was a small slider which I slid to my left gently and heard a soft click, nothing happened though. I tried to lift the lid which was pretty tight and thought again, maybe I'm about to damage something. Well, wonder no more, the hinge was pretty tight as it had to support a heavy screen from falling back or forth. A nice little silver button sit there right over the top of the keyboard with a power ON/OFF sign. (well this one was pretty smooth), a little but firm touch and the machine breathed to life. No matter how many times I installed OSes on the machine(s) in my organisation, this Windows XP logo looked different. During the boot, the OS took me through the initial windows configuration wizard where in I declined to register windows (as I don't yet know the utility of this 'bug' in Windows), chose to use automatic updates and create users on the machine.
Body and build: -
The machine is built off the same chassis as the XPS M1710 which Dell claims to be a 'gamer's laptop' minus the filmsy lights which glow through several places on the XPS. The lights on the XPS add a sci-fi look to the XPS which you would'nt need if you are a serious tech geek (and I wonder if those lights are battery friendly). As heavy as 5Kgs this machine is built for sturdiness, solid state operations and long running hours. There's no flex in the body. The build material is of top notch quality and paired with a complete cover warranty which I purchased, you need not worry about this Dell getting damaged. I could use it as a shield if I were attacked.
The front of the case has seven media control buttons which render the Windows Media Player buttons useless. Mute, volume+, volume-, pause/play, previous, next and stop count seven and that's all I'd need if I'd want to close the lid and let music play on the machine.
Connectivity: -
Being an electronics enthusiast, an avid singer who pursues immense interest in music and and entertainment buff I needed all the connectivity to use this machine with all the gadgets available in the world. I was a little scared to try turning it upside down to look underneath, but it was worth it. With a docking connector sitting at the bottom (which I couldn't recognise at first being naive to notebooks), this mobile workstation features 6 USB ports (4 at the back and 2 at the left side), a port for modem and another one for LAN, s-video, DVI, and VGA out connectors. On the left again is the DVD drive, on the right is the headphone out, mic. in, firewire 1394, and three other slots for memory/media cards which I've never come across, including one for smartcard. I'm yet to connect this machine to a TV and I know it'd work because the nVidia card would let you chose a frequency and the aspect ratio of the video which is compatible with a TV (not every machine lets you do that but just in case you do want to do that to other machines you could use a utility called 'powerstrip'; search for it on Google). I tried to connect this machine to an external CRT monitor and that worked fine. I don't have a Bluetooth device or a wireless router yet to try Bluetooth or wireless connectivity. I'll
Audio: -
I also found a small circular vent on the underside which I concluded could be a subwoofer which I had heard rumours about. The sound it made while bringing me to the desktop felt nice though without bass. I tried to content myself off the fact that I couldn't expect much from a woofer the size of an inch. (That was till I found out a special slider in the volume controls for the subwoofer which was turned down all to the minimum. And then I played one of my favourites Enrique Iglesias's 'Hero'. Ah, nothing could be more soothing.) The two built-in speakers are placed on the extreme left and right of the front of the machine thus creating an envelop of sound around if you are working on the machine. This also makes the sound come out directly so that treble is preserved and the sound is louder is its entirety. If you place the machine on your lap you may stifle the subwoofer. The best response you get out of the sub is when you place the machine on a solid surface. That leaves some gap for the subwoofer while the machine sits on the rubber toes (I can't think of a word that'd sound more appropriate). The sound quality now left nothing else to be desired. This is rare with a laptop. The sound was clear and original and loud too. Lowering down the volume made it a perfect harmony of the subtles and the melodious.
Screen: -
Welcome to the desktop, it's a large and the largest desktop I could imagine, with a Dell special wallpaper (which I lost later while configuring multi-boot). This is a high resolution LCD screen and suitable for graphic designers. But I'm sure it'd suite all, you do want to have a lot of space on your desktop. The clarity of this screen would rival the best of the CRTs, the reason being that CRTs don't have a fixed pixel aspect ratio whereas in an LCD every video pixel corresponds to a hardware pixel (a pixel on the LCD screen). The down side to this is that if you want to work on a lower resolution you have to sacrifice by making a choice. Since every video pixel corresponds to a pixel on the screen, you can chose the video to be
Stretched to fit the screen which kills all the sharpness and makes it blurry like the CRT while also killing the aspect ratio. It stretches it horizontally and vertically as required. (possible through nVidia GPU settings and also BIOS). Displayed with the fixed aspect ratio i.e the largest size possible while maintaining the aspect ratio. This would mean black bands on the right and left side of the display area and/or on the top and bottom (possible through nVidia GPU settings only). This still would mean that you kill the sharpness but maintain the aspect ratio. Centered. This would keep the pixel aspect ratio and thus maintain the sharpness. Every video pixel would correspond to a hardware pixel on the screen. This would also maintain the aspect ratio of the resolution you have chosen. Again, only a portion of the entirely display would be used and thus you'd seen thicker black bands to the sides of the displayed video. To my surprise, the font was easily readable and later I realised it was due to a higher dpi settings (120DPI) for the font. Everything was good and clear, perfectly sharp and I'm yet to find any dead pixels. I put the machine aside to attend a phone call and while I was on the call I realised that the viewing angle of this screen was 180 deg.
What couldn't (could) I do with such a powerful machine? Nothing, not yet as I need to download and configure the system to my 'tastes' which would mean hours of dedicated hardword and eyestrain. So what next? Well if tomorrow this thing goes down, there's little I could do other than expecting tech support from Dell. So… I looked at the OEM installed programs and drivers and other utilities and settings after which I created three partitions to support multiboot and then 12 hrs all it took to configure, transfer my files and data which I use. The cable modem was yet not configured as I got the connection especially for this machine. Well I gave the ISP a call and the next day late in the morning, I had my internet connection running.
Keyboard and Touchpad: -
It's my third week and I'm still getting used to this keyboard as it feels real nice and delicate to my heavy fingers (and also the fact that I'm not used to typing on notebooks;). But, I'm yet to see a keyboard better than this, in notebooks and in desktops. Its keys have just the right resistance to the finger pressure and I feel perfectly at ease when I type subconsciously. Also its faster to type on this keyboard than on a desktop keyboard. The touch pad has a vertical scrollbar on the right edge and a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom edge which spares you the task of reaching out to the scrollbars of the window. Yoy may find it problematic to occasionally intrude into the scrollbar region while using the touchpad but again they can be disabled from the Synaptics touchpad configuration utility. I'd have preferred a built-in stick pointer because that gives you a better control of the pointer while you are typing (you don't have to reach out too far to control the pointer in the typing position). But anyways, I'd not consider this to be a down side. There's a lot of space to rest your palms and the touch pad provides you with three buttons. I would readily sacrifice the middle button had that place been used to replace the button with a fingerprint reader. Anyways.
Performance: -
I've never cared to run benchmarks for the systems because I've always worked on machines which were never worthy of it; from windows 95 to windows xp running on Pentium II to Pentium IV 1.4 GHz or even Pentium IV @ 2GHz doesn't tempt you to benchmark the systems while you struggle to get your work done. Well, so I don't have any experience benchmarking machines and I'm not familiar with such things. So I can give you an idea of the performance of this machine in a layman's language.
The boot time for this machine (from the time you pushed the power button to the time you were shown the login screen was accurately 25 seconds.) The time it took to see the face of internet explorer from the time you clicked the IE icon was less than a second. If you want to see a real world example (and not a synthetic benchmark) consider the following: -
The configuration of my office machine is P4 1.4GHz (core solo) with 512 MB RAM. I can't remember the HDD RPMs or the RAM speed, but this should give you a fair idea. Compiling Firefox on my office machine took 11hrs 30 mins (with the optimisations I specified earlier). This includes multiple activities, reading and writing thousands of files to and from the HDD, generating code which means a lot of heavy computing for the CPU, writing the generated code to the RAM and reading it out later for further linking etc. During all this activity there were times when the machine used to freeze up on me for minutes, and the killer period was the linking time when the memory usage was at its peak, the linker and other apps consuming about more than 1GB. And finally the installer building phase which used 7zip compression and took about 15-20mins to compress about 15Mb of installer to 8Mb.
With the Dell Precision M90 with the configuration that I have, it takes a flat 1Hr 20mins to finish all. I kept an eye on the task manager which used 25% at the peak. I missed noticing the linking phase and the installer building phase as I didn't expect it to happen so soon. At no point did I realise any sluggish activity or freezes. I worked as normal and the machine came out through my real world benchmark with flying colours.
Battery: -
For the killer tasks like above you could expect to use the battery for about 2 hrs (never tried it) and generally for regular office work it'd last you 3+ hrs.
Heat and Noise: -
After 2-3 weeks of using this machine I wondered if there does exist a fan inside or if it does, does it turn on at all. I had to specially put my ear right next to the vent (which is used by the fans to exhaust the hot air) to hear the fan running. It only used to turn on occasionally for a few minutes and only during the peak load times. During all the while the palm-rest never used to heat up (which the other books are notorious for). The notebook used to run pretty cool on all sides but the rear and underneath the centre of the keyboard where I believe the processor (rear left), the GPU (rear right) and (maybe) the RAM may be placed respectively. But you can't say that it heats up, it only becomes a little warm unlike other notebooks which I seen to be blowing hot air which could cook the surface of your finger. You'll never feel any heat but for the normal room temperature in India, you'd start sweating after working on this for 30mins (if you place this on your lap) without realising the fact that the machine is the culprit. On second thoughts, you could use this feature for the Indian winters :).
On the noise part I did occasionally hear a screech for the machine seeking the HDD, but again you can configure the HDD acoustics mode from the BIOS and once I did that I didn't notice any sounds.
Warranty and Service: -
Unlike the warranty for other models which lasts about 1yr, this Dell comes with a 3yrs next business day onsite service and free parts replacement + 3yrs free phone tech support. I also went for a Complete Cover tm to avoid a heart attack in case of accidental damage to this sweetheart of mine. I'd never use tech support until there's something terribly wrong on the manufacturers' side but I did get a chance as Wave Embassy Trust Suite was missing from the Drivers and Utilities CD. Once I downloaded it after configuring my system for multiboot, the system crashed and froze on me till I found the culprit. McAfee has a known issue with the Wave Embassy Trust Suite application on this Dell (got to do with the TPM technology) wherein the McAfee Buffer Overflow Protection blocks some critical Windows services so terribly that I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling McAfee, Wave Embassy Trust Suite and the OS each multiple times until I applied McAfee Patch 11 after which everything was in place. (I had to Google a lot for this one).
I hate to say this but every time I called the customer care they rather sounded dumb and ignorant. The tech support though did understand what I asked for and in case they didn't, they did care to put me on hold to do some research and come up with the right solution (being a tech I knew they were right and also from the fact that their suggestion worked). So sales and the tech support are good but like everywhere else, there are always grievances with the customer care. Anyways, hope I'll never have to call them back (but if I were to buy a new machine, I'd only go for a Dell).
Final word: -
If you think you can justify the purchase of this notebook with your gaming interests or the need for a desktop replacement, look elsewhere. Games would definitely run better than that on an of-the-league notebook but (I think) this GPU is not clocked for games but for accuracy of rendering. Again, I'm not saying that they'd not fare well but they'd run better if you were to use a GPU clocked (and the one you could over-clock) for speed rather than accuracy of graphics rendering. Finally if you do want to look for accurate info regarding gaming on this model you could use Google as I'm not a gamer anyways.
This machine is in fact meant for the serious developer who is essentially a heavy multi-tasker, is a high-end graphics developer or the kind who'd prefer to carry his production server with him. This particular model is certified by 32 ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). Performance is not all that this little monster has, this is fact would laugh in the face of upcoming Vista and of the thieves who are yet to come across the definition of TPM J. Also it features notebook tracking software by CompuServe Information Service (I believe; you could find that in the BIOS which may also tell you that though this feature and functionality is present, you need to purchase the tracking service separately and is only available in select countries of which India is not on the list). This is meant for the corporate kinds who do serious business heavy-duty production and development work to and from between office and home office or the kinds who'd like to sleep in their forts wherever they are.
