1210M Impressions - Page 2

As soon as I recieve the thing (Monday), I plan to do a fully comprehensive review with multiple battery tests (Wifi, gaming, wifi+gaming, and on and on), benchmarking before and after reformatting, and so forth. I'm really rather bored.

games and battery life

im curious about this compact powerhose and how it does with games/battery life

hows this for a battery test

game (doom3/half-life 2/fear) max details with good gaming performance
wi-fi on
screen brightness max
multiplayer game via internet

lets see how long it takes to kill the sucker

I was thinking of doing 3DMark06 in demo mode to really push the sucker, Winamp streaming some music over the internet, and screen brightness to max. Probably doesn't matter what's happening over wifi, as long as it's something. That will be the first test I do at least, that and a basic power conserving test.

OK, few more days on it and some more impressions:

Gaming - wow. I expected it to be really bad, but it wasn't. This is with the X1400, but I found Oblivion quite playable, HL2 as well. To be fair, Half Life 2 is remarkably easy on hardware and since games only run at 1280 x 800 the system isn't pushed as hard as I'm used to.

I won't be replacing my main system with it, but I'll be happy when I travel that I can play games if I want to. Very very happy, considering that I used to drag around my XPS Gen1 for it and won't anymore.

Keyboard flex - I type pretty quickly and have had no problems with it. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I type faster on the M1210 than on the XPS Gen1.

Audio - OK, I'm prepared to give a bit on this one, but only a little. The audio is very clear, just lacks any bass whatsoever.

Some annoyances/improvement hopes:
I hope they allow you to turn on / off the blue LEDs for the media keys. As near as I can tell this is only able to be done in the BIOS (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong!). Would love an app that lets you use those LEDs for something.

Screen Closing - Confused by this. I have not installed new drivers or anything but if I close the screen then open it again I don't get a screen again. It just stays dark till I power it off. Have to call support on this.

Speed - I continue to be impressed by how fast it is in Windows. I'm generally not doing CPU intesive tasks, mostly just office / business apps, but the thing flies. I'm used to high end PCs, but am also used to laptops being a step behind... this just doesn't feel slower.

Upgrading - I added RAM to it which involves removing a lower panel (Very easy) and the keyboard. It was also easy to remove the keyboard, but for the love of all that is holy make sure you follow the directions and use a plastic tool to pop open the panel above the keyboard or you'll certainly scratch it up.

Upgrading, Con't - The hard drive is Serial ATA - make sure you get the right one if you upgrade it. I've seen a couple of people be surprised by this. At present the largest SATA laptop drive I've found is a 100GB. I'm sure a 160 will be out soon. On a related note, it's very nice to be able to connect them to a PC without special adapters.

Noise and Heat - It seems to stay very quiet all the time. Even while running Oblivion. I never felt it got particularly hot, though I didn't keep it on my lap while gaming.

Nice little write-up. The cure for the screen not coming on anymore is to press FN+F8. Someone else on the boards figured this out as it was annoying the crap out of me too. The drivers for the video card need some SERIOUS updating. If you use ANY other driver, the screen won't turn off at all no matter what, so we're stuck with these ones for now.

a 120gb is available

There are a lot of inferior cards that could handle new games running at a max 1280x800 resolution.

I a VERY impressed with it's performance as well. Even at 640x480 my old nvidia go 6200 choked badly with all setting tuned down. It is supposed to be about 2/3rds the performance of the 7400 yet it is many times more powerful in real world performance. Of course better processor and memory speed help, but still in theory the best it would perform was 1.5 times as fast as the 6200.

Plus 1280x800 isn't THAT low, and you assume that we are only using the internal screen.

Ah, crap - I left out 7200 RPM in there (I wouldn't use anything less, it's a big improvement).

I would say that this is one of the best laptops that dell has put out.

The extended battery is a MUST, and the 7400 is good if you plan to play games, otherwise just stick with the integrated.


They actually put some effort to upgrading the sound quality by actually removing the sound card from the motherboard, so it doesnt pick up hdd noise, etc. Though, with the included earbuds, you do get a slight hum... but not any worse than the best integrated sound cards.

Fan is very good, slow mode is totally silent, and high speed fan will never come on.

laptop gets warm on your wrists, but not hot. Bottom gets fairly warm, but again not super hot. The entire bottom chassis is metal magesium alloy, so it does a good job of being a heat sink.

The bottom compartments are easy access, and are really easy to upgrade.

I dont like how the bluetooth is installed, i wish it had a cover. If you dont get bluetooth installed, every time you take out the battery, you see the cable being held down by masking tape. Seems like it would fall off and eventually get in the way of the battery if you add/remove battery constantly.

Keyboard is GREAT. I dont know what people are complaining about. I have a little keyboard flex down by the up/down/left/right arrows, but im sure i could fix that with a spacer. Very minor.

I like how they went ahead and made the keys FULL SIZE BABY! Yes! It works very well.


High quality touch pad, NOT the same touch pad that other inspirons use, good stuff.



Lets see, screen is the same as the 700/710m screen, no difference. it is just OKAY, as before.


The GPU overclocks decent, i HATE how they attached the GPU to the heatpipe. They use the same spoungy TIM that they use on the north bridge 945 chip, which sucks... then on top of that, they have a thin piece of copper, then a gold looking TIM. This leaves the GPU getting hot all the time, and hurting overclocks! Oh well, still overclocks to 560/1100 -highest mem overclock allowed by nvidia! (memory is 1.4ns samsung)


Hrm, I agree about the blue lights, I wish you could turn them off, they get annoying.

headphone jack location sucks, it is too hard to connect/disconnect headphones, because it is practically on the bottom of the notebook, though i REALLY like how there is two headphone ports.

Webcam is okay, but gets hot. I like how it can rotate! Very cool! Integrated mic could be a little better.

Onboard speakers, well, i didnt expect much, no comment.

black top looks cool, but leaves lots of fingerprints, I wish there was a better answer to help with the finger print issue.



Also, at this point, screw including a D-SUB output, just give us a DVI output. We dont buy 1300+ dollar laptops to use S-DUB for our external LCD. If people want to use DSUB, let them use a DVI to DSUB converter.


Overall, I am very impressed though, for the first time it seems like dell figured out what their customers actually wanted. The only thing they dont want is the price. The build quality is VERY good, after taking the whole thing apart, it is rather well put together.


Anyway, I give it a score of 98 out of 100.

nice write up, and wow...98 out of 100. That's pretty high praise. I like this laptop a lot, but there are definite areas where it could have improved. I compare most notebooks to an old IBM Thinkpad T21 that I owned for about 3 years, since it was probably the best notebook I've ever owned. Of course, it wouldn't compare in terms of performace to anything that's out today but it was pretty much the top of the line system back then...so if I were to give that laptop a score of 100, I would probably rate this somewhere in the ballpark of 92-95. If it shaved a half a pound or so and maybe a quarter of an inch in height...it would be right up there.

I wish one of you M1210 owners would take a few pictures for us

go take a look at my review in the review forum...plenty of pictures.

FYI, there is a fix for this. Check out this thread:

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread152493.html

Howie

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not the problem. The M1210 display problem is a video driver issue. The way to bring the screen back on is to press FN+F8. Hopefully Dell will release a new video driver soon, cause this one stinks to high heaven. *edit* There's a new 84.69 driver on Dell's web site today. Downloading now.. *fingers crossed*

Ooooh! Let us know how you get on with that!

Si

Yep, new driver is total crap as well. Same screen-not-turning-on bug, and still has the bug that your windows are all resized when you open the display again too.

*sigh*

But did your 3dmark05 scores go up?

Bah, who cares?

I want proper video-card drivers darnit!