Saturday evening, I was over at a friend's place hanging out. He was complaining about how he never used his 600m. (He has an eMachines M6811 and an A64 3200+ tower as well) He got the early March deal, a 600m for $480-ish.
I was in the market for a cheap secondary laptop (actually, looking at around $250-ish) to pull remedial duties(print server, personal FTP, download proxy, and general testbed of software). My tower does my gaming and multimedia, my T43 does my web browsing and all other non-media jobs...this could just sit in a corner and grind away at downloads and uploads.
I offered him $400 cash + an APC 800 UPS I hadn't used in over a year. I knew I'd be getting a good deal if he were (crazy enough) to accept it, and he needed the cash for some house repairs anyway. So, I found myself the owner of a 2 month old, seldom used, almost never taken off the desk, laptop. A perfect unit for my needs, and, with compatibility with Latitude D600s, I know that there will be plenty of parts available for it in the future.
The specs:
Dell 600m
1.4ghz Celeron-M
1gb PC2700 (2x512mb)
40gb 5400rpm
Sony DVD+-DL
32mb Radeon 9000
Dell 1370 WiFi
I took it home, and formatted it in the morning.
The praise:
The system is certainly a notch above the Toshiba Satellite L25 I got during the Black Friday sale last year...solely for its use of an intel platform (over the ATI Xpress 200 chipset of the L25). (I sold that laptop a month later)
It's faster, thanks to the increased RAM, and the videocard is arguably better (I'll take a dedicated chip over integrated any day of the week).
The battery life is certainly better. I've not given it a good run yet, but I know my friend said he'd get 2-3 hours out of it regularly. The Toshiba had a hard time getting 1 hour.
The touchpad is not rubbery like the Toshiba's, and the keyboard layout isn't completely convuluted.
Sadly...that's where all the praise ends....because now we get to compare it to the Thinkpad. Granted, this would be more fair with a D600, but other than it being metal where the 600m is plastic, my sentiments would remain unchanged.
The touchpad is nowhere near as responsive as the T4x's(which I never use it, as I prefer the trackpoint). 1 minute it'll be fine, the next it'll stop registering my finger. Dad's Inspiron 1100 is just as bad.
The hinges are nowhere near as stiff as my Thinkpad T4x. There's about 3/4" of flex/wiggle room once the screen is in place.
The unit feels bulky, heavy and weak, thanks to all that plastic. The T4x just feels solid, even though it weighs just about the same. Not sure why the 600M feels heavier...
The Dell 1370 has crappy non-Windows support, thanks to Broadcomm. I'm currently looking into getting an Atheros or Intel card to replace it...
The DVD burner will not burn discs that 8 other drives (on 4 other computers) have no issue with. I've tried updating the firmware, but it will not burn on the Ridata 8x discs I have. I was able to get it to burn on a Memorex 16x of my dad's, but unfortunately, when trying to do a ghost restore, I found out that the image was corrupt. Not sure if that's the disc, or the burner...but I've never had a corrupt Ghost image before. (I got stuck installing XP twice yesterday). I will be calling Dell on my lunch break and try to break through their broken English (assuming I get off hold in the timespan of my lunch break) to procure a compatible non-Sony DVD burner.
All in all, I'm happy with the unit...it's got good power, and will suit my needs pretty well once I get the WiFi and DVD burner issues dealt with. I bought it as a "junker", and it will certainly be overkill in that category.
It'll never replace the Thinkpad, but I'd certainly reccomend it over the Satellite.
I'm not sure why, but the quality of the unit just doesn't feel like it's comparable to my brother's 9 month old 700m. While I do not care for its shiny screen, that laptop feels to be better built than this one.
Pics will be added later.
I was in the market for a cheap secondary laptop (actually, looking at around $250-ish) to pull remedial duties(print server, personal FTP, download proxy, and general testbed of software). My tower does my gaming and multimedia, my T43 does my web browsing and all other non-media jobs...this could just sit in a corner and grind away at downloads and uploads.
I offered him $400 cash + an APC 800 UPS I hadn't used in over a year. I knew I'd be getting a good deal if he were (crazy enough) to accept it, and he needed the cash for some house repairs anyway. So, I found myself the owner of a 2 month old, seldom used, almost never taken off the desk, laptop. A perfect unit for my needs, and, with compatibility with Latitude D600s, I know that there will be plenty of parts available for it in the future.
The specs:
Dell 600m
1.4ghz Celeron-M
1gb PC2700 (2x512mb)
40gb 5400rpm
Sony DVD+-DL
32mb Radeon 9000
Dell 1370 WiFi
I took it home, and formatted it in the morning.
The praise:
The system is certainly a notch above the Toshiba Satellite L25 I got during the Black Friday sale last year...solely for its use of an intel platform (over the ATI Xpress 200 chipset of the L25). (I sold that laptop a month later)
It's faster, thanks to the increased RAM, and the videocard is arguably better (I'll take a dedicated chip over integrated any day of the week).
The battery life is certainly better. I've not given it a good run yet, but I know my friend said he'd get 2-3 hours out of it regularly. The Toshiba had a hard time getting 1 hour.
The touchpad is not rubbery like the Toshiba's, and the keyboard layout isn't completely convuluted.
Sadly...that's where all the praise ends....because now we get to compare it to the Thinkpad. Granted, this would be more fair with a D600, but other than it being metal where the 600m is plastic, my sentiments would remain unchanged.
The touchpad is nowhere near as responsive as the T4x's(which I never use it, as I prefer the trackpoint). 1 minute it'll be fine, the next it'll stop registering my finger. Dad's Inspiron 1100 is just as bad.
The hinges are nowhere near as stiff as my Thinkpad T4x. There's about 3/4" of flex/wiggle room once the screen is in place.
The unit feels bulky, heavy and weak, thanks to all that plastic. The T4x just feels solid, even though it weighs just about the same. Not sure why the 600M feels heavier...
The Dell 1370 has crappy non-Windows support, thanks to Broadcomm. I'm currently looking into getting an Atheros or Intel card to replace it...
The DVD burner will not burn discs that 8 other drives (on 4 other computers) have no issue with. I've tried updating the firmware, but it will not burn on the Ridata 8x discs I have. I was able to get it to burn on a Memorex 16x of my dad's, but unfortunately, when trying to do a ghost restore, I found out that the image was corrupt. Not sure if that's the disc, or the burner...but I've never had a corrupt Ghost image before. (I got stuck installing XP twice yesterday). I will be calling Dell on my lunch break and try to break through their broken English (assuming I get off hold in the timespan of my lunch break) to procure a compatible non-Sony DVD burner.
All in all, I'm happy with the unit...it's got good power, and will suit my needs pretty well once I get the WiFi and DVD burner issues dealt with. I bought it as a "junker", and it will certainly be overkill in that category.
It'll never replace the Thinkpad, but I'd certainly reccomend it over the Satellite.
I'm not sure why, but the quality of the unit just doesn't feel like it's comparable to my brother's 9 month old 700m. While I do not care for its shiny screen, that laptop feels to be better built than this one.
Pics will be added later.
