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So far, so good
Mar. 1st, 2008 10:18 pmI'd been humming and hawing for a while now about getting a new laptop. My old one became unusable a couple of years ago - slow as molasses running uphill, and the battery wouldn't hold a charge - it would only work when connected to power.
I really haven't had much need of a laptop, since I have a work laptop, and several home desktops. However, prices are finally at a level where I felt it was worth buying a new machine.
The Dell Inspiron 1525 arrived yesterday. I ordered it with a 120GB drive and 2GB of memory; the processor is an Intel Duo 2 T7250. It was preconfigured with Vista Home Premium; a plus and a minus. I really didn't want to run a Vista machine; but for my business I was beginning to feel the need of some expertise with this OS. I was fairly confident in the machine being able to run the OS though, with the upgraded processor and memory.
After a day playing with it (I'm writing on it now) I'd say it's pretty solid - not what I expected at all.
One of the first things I did was turn off UAC - this complex security sotftware was intended to repair Microsoft's poor record on security. It certainly tightens security, but is so cumbersome (particularly on a new machine where you are doing a lot of installations and configurations) it rapidly becomes a major inconvenience. I might reenable it at some point.
The Aero Glass works well enough - but if I'd needed a machine that looked like a Mac, I reckon I would have bought a Mac. Given that this machine is many times more powerful than my main machine (a Dell Dimension 2400 desktop) you'd expect it to fly - and it is more responsive, but not by much. I see no value in the sidebar - I don't need an extra clock, an RSS headline feed, or any of the other stuff, on my desktop. That was turned off after UAC. If these widgets worked the way they do on a Mac (where you can bring them to the foreground with a key press, and hide them easily) then they might be more useful. As currently designed, the sidebar sits on the desktop and remains largely covered when I'm working on other projects.
The only driver problem I've had so far is with our OKI Data printer. No Vista driver avaialable, and Vista couldn't suggest a generic driver for this network device. OKI's site suggested that the XP drive would run just fine, so I downloaded the lastest XP version. Then I tried the auto-install from OKI, to find that hte program won't run in Vista at all. Fortunately, a manual configuration of the printer got me going. The only other device I might want to put on this is the scanner, but I know it's too old to have Vista drivers, so that is unlikely to happen.
I was impressed with the network self-discovery and setup, including joining itself to two workgroups I use (though that's a little worrying - maybe I didn't WANT it to join the workgroups?). I was equally impressed that two old but cherished utilities (both developed for Windows 2000) installed and ran flawlessly. These two should be standard functions in the OS - one reliably copies folders from one location to another (ignoring problems until the end, like unmoveable files etc) and the other synchronizes folders across drives - which I use on all our machines for backups to our home server). Filesync and FolderClone are no longer maintained, but are still functional. I've been using them since Windows 98.
Screen handling is definitely improved, with intelligent auto-adjustment and options when i connected to my dual flat panel desktop displays through a KVM switch - including auto-adjusting when I flicked the KVM switch to monitor a different system - the whole extended workspace being moved automatically back to my laptop screen - and then being moved back again when the KVM was toggled to allow expansion of the desktop. Very smooth.
I still have concerns about the the OS, but I have to say my first day with it has made me feel much more hopeful than I was when I first started the setup this morning. Time will tell how compatible this machine really is with various applications and workload. Fingers crossed.
I really haven't had much need of a laptop, since I have a work laptop, and several home desktops. However, prices are finally at a level where I felt it was worth buying a new machine.
The Dell Inspiron 1525 arrived yesterday. I ordered it with a 120GB drive and 2GB of memory; the processor is an Intel Duo 2 T7250. It was preconfigured with Vista Home Premium; a plus and a minus. I really didn't want to run a Vista machine; but for my business I was beginning to feel the need of some expertise with this OS. I was fairly confident in the machine being able to run the OS though, with the upgraded processor and memory.
After a day playing with it (I'm writing on it now) I'd say it's pretty solid - not what I expected at all.
One of the first things I did was turn off UAC - this complex security sotftware was intended to repair Microsoft's poor record on security. It certainly tightens security, but is so cumbersome (particularly on a new machine where you are doing a lot of installations and configurations) it rapidly becomes a major inconvenience. I might reenable it at some point.
The Aero Glass works well enough - but if I'd needed a machine that looked like a Mac, I reckon I would have bought a Mac. Given that this machine is many times more powerful than my main machine (a Dell Dimension 2400 desktop) you'd expect it to fly - and it is more responsive, but not by much. I see no value in the sidebar - I don't need an extra clock, an RSS headline feed, or any of the other stuff, on my desktop. That was turned off after UAC. If these widgets worked the way they do on a Mac (where you can bring them to the foreground with a key press, and hide them easily) then they might be more useful. As currently designed, the sidebar sits on the desktop and remains largely covered when I'm working on other projects.
The only driver problem I've had so far is with our OKI Data printer. No Vista driver avaialable, and Vista couldn't suggest a generic driver for this network device. OKI's site suggested that the XP drive would run just fine, so I downloaded the lastest XP version. Then I tried the auto-install from OKI, to find that hte program won't run in Vista at all. Fortunately, a manual configuration of the printer got me going. The only other device I might want to put on this is the scanner, but I know it's too old to have Vista drivers, so that is unlikely to happen.
I was impressed with the network self-discovery and setup, including joining itself to two workgroups I use (though that's a little worrying - maybe I didn't WANT it to join the workgroups?). I was equally impressed that two old but cherished utilities (both developed for Windows 2000) installed and ran flawlessly. These two should be standard functions in the OS - one reliably copies folders from one location to another (ignoring problems until the end, like unmoveable files etc) and the other synchronizes folders across drives - which I use on all our machines for backups to our home server). Filesync and FolderClone are no longer maintained, but are still functional. I've been using them since Windows 98.
Screen handling is definitely improved, with intelligent auto-adjustment and options when i connected to my dual flat panel desktop displays through a KVM switch - including auto-adjusting when I flicked the KVM switch to monitor a different system - the whole extended workspace being moved automatically back to my laptop screen - and then being moved back again when the KVM was toggled to allow expansion of the desktop. Very smooth.
I still have concerns about the the OS, but I have to say my first day with it has made me feel much more hopeful than I was when I first started the setup this morning. Time will tell how compatible this machine really is with various applications and workload. Fingers crossed.
