8500 to M90 transition

I just heard that my Dell Precision m90 is on order.

My trusty Inspiron 8500 was 3 and a half years old; it had been starting to fail in various ways:

• DVD drive won't eject without much persuasion
• SMART diagnostics show many disk errors
• Increasingly loud fan noise
• Cracked base plate
• One power supply blewup,last year

So it was limping along and out of warranty, which is why I was looking around for a replacement. This forum was extremely helpfu lin that search. But first, the old machine.

I have been very happy with this laptop, it has a great screen which is very important to me since my work involves graphics (mainly 2D, though some of the software now uses 3D acceleration for 2D)

The Pentium IV M does get a bit hot and is nowhere near as fast as its 2.5 GHz clock would suggest. A gig of RAM was a lot when I ordered it (though I certainly use it, and have another 2.5 gig of swap). 60Gig drive (5400 rpm) was an improvement over the 40G I had in the Compaq E500 that preceded the Dell 8500 - it was soon augmented by a external USB Firelite 2.5" 40G for travel, and later a Maxtor 3.5 500G (great drive) which I don't travel with

The graphics card is okay for 2D but showing its age (and rubbish for games, which is okay as I do a little light gaming but its not a major use case); Omega drivers rather than stock Dell ones help there. Its OpenGL in particular is old and pathetic.

I was lucky and got one of the 8500s right after Dell fixed the 'wobbly right hand half of the keyboard' flaw.

It was running XP Pro, then SP1, then SP2. For a shell, I experimented with litestep but found it too unstable so switched to window blinds and then object desktop.

So, that was my trusty workhorse. Its flown to like 30 countries. And last week, Wednesday, it froze and died. Unresponsive to mouse and keyboard. Unresponsive to power/on-off switch. After pulling the battery and power, it would not boot. Would not even POST. The three lights next to the power switch come on briefly, then it switches itself off again. Eek. No laptop.

Tiding me over

My first thought when the laptop died was 'How recent are my backups'. My second,third etc thoughts were 'oops, email back up maybe a couple of weeks old' and 'ah' and wondering how much of the other data that tends to get scattered around was backed up.

Now, it happens that my partner got a nearly-new 8500, second hand overstock, at the same time as I got mine. its similar-British keyboard instead of US, low-res 1280x800 screen, older BIOS. Travelled a lot less with it.

Pulled the disk out of my old laptop, popped it into hers and aha- it posts.it boots. It presents a totally black screen. Hmm. Reboot in safe mode - yes,it works. Set resolution down tolike104x768. Reboot. Black screen. Reboot, check what the bios says. Reboot to safe mode. Reinstall the omega drivers. reboot-black screen.

Safe mode, delete the graphics card (which is an ATI Mobility 9000 same as mine). Reboot, it finds new hardware, installs itself. Tells me that 640x480 in 16 colors is too low- I agree and change it to 800x600 in 32 bits. Black screen. Not even the 15 seconds and go back to the last settings thing.

Decide that graphical richness is not actually required to run backups connect the 500G usb drive and back up like crazy. Yes, I had backups of some stuff. But now I have daily mail backups and daily work backups and all that good stuff. Synchromagic Pro is a good program, especially if you actually use it.

These specs are currently in my sig but will probably go away soon so:

Dell Inspiron 8500 | 2.5GHz P IVM | 1Gb 266 SDRAM | Hitachi DK23FB-60 Gb 5400 disk, 8Mb cache | 1920x1200 | ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, 32Mb, Omega drivers

Looking for a better computer

When I first started looking around for a replacement (my company's policy is to replace once the machine is out of warranty) I hit a problem - how to get a better laptop?

I was totally sold on the widescreen, matt, 1920x1200 screen.Yet the 8600 (which was the centrino replacement for the 8500) and subsequent Dell models (D800,810,820) seemed to have frequently reported screen quality issues. My screen was great, was very happy with it. At mimimum, I wanted one as good.

Disk was another issue - 60G 3 years ago was better than 30G six years ago and 8 Gig eight years ago but not by that much. My disk usage was increasing faster than the hardware. Programs were taking more space-such as Adobe Creative suite, which takes a lot of disk; and Corel Draw suite 12 (for my job, I tend to need multiple competing products installed concurrently and to compare them).
cvs checkouts, photoshop files, program archives, all taking up space. And then of course some personal stuff, music and photos and soon.

Actually it was the latter that convinced me to buy my own external disk. That solved the space problem for a while, and the big disk (plus deciding what data I actually really need on travel and what I don't) really solved it.

I also wanted a faster disk (waiting for disk activity is more common than waiting for cpu-bound activity) and a faster cpu wouldn't hurt (waiting for png and jpeg compression, for example). More memory, clearly; with 1G RAM I was often using another 0.5 to 1G of swap. And since I typically run a bunch of programs at once,better multitasking.

Lastly, although most of my graphical work is 2D, there was a need for better graphics. Moving semi-transparent overlays was noticeably laggy. SVG implementations are starting to use 3D acceleration - in fact that happened first on mobile, then came to the desktop. Full OpenGL 2.0 was needed, and one implementation needs shader model 3. Even my window manager benefits from hardware acceleration.

All of which led me towards a Dell Precision M90. A colleague has an M70 and likes it. It has the 1920x1200 matt screen (I soon found that I wasn't going to get a higher resolution, like 2560x1600). The 2500M,after some research, looked like a great card.

This forum was really helpful for me to make an informed selection. Many thanks to the knowledgeable folks here.

in progress - and the wonders of localization

√1. Traitement de la commande
√2. Préproduction
3. Productionlundi, novembre 06, 2006
4. Préparation de la livraison
5. Expédié

Yes, its being ordered through Dell France. I work in France.

Which took some manouvering by our IT dept and the Dell Corporate sales guy.

"Hi, we need a Dell M90 with a French power supply and a French modem, but with a US QWERTY keyboard instead of a french AZERTY one, and a US XP Pro OS"

They did it! Kudos to our IT guys for persuasive skills and persistence.

So it will ship as requested with a US OS and US keyboard; and French power plugs and whatever regulatory stickies need to be on modems nowadays.

Of course, I don't care much about the modem, and a power plug is just an adapter away from whatever; but not having to trip around an AZERTY keyboard is a big plus (and not having to buy a QWERTY one from Dell Spares and install it, is a plus, too).

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY for how horrible that would have been.

I have also learned, through past painful experience, that having a French OS and installing English programs in it is a source of endless problems. (What bright spark decided to translate all the standard Windows directory names when localizing an OS?). So again, I'm really glad its going to ship with a US version of XP pro, from the factory.

√1. Traitement de la commande
√2. Préproduction
√3. Production
4. Préparation de la livraisonmardi, novembre 07, 2006
5. Expédié

Getting there, getting there....

8500 benchmarks (for comparison)

Since this is 17 inch Dell forum, ie for the new laptop when it arrives, I made a new thread over here
http://www.notebookforums.com/thread180785.html
for comparative benchmarks on the old system(s).

Will post the new benchmarks once I have the M90.

Shipped! and wrong

On the plus side,the M90 has now shipped from Limerick, Ireland.

On the downside (from the electronic packing slip):

1 CD de restauration non inclus-Précision 340-13362
1 Français- Windows XP Professionnel SP2 (sans CD de réinstallation) 619-10782
1 Français-CD de réinstallation pour Windows XP Profressionnel SP2 620-10530

I think that means the pre-installed OS is French, not US as ordered; that the re-install CD is also French, and that there is no other re-install CD. Great.

Its here

The M90 was delivered by UPS around lunchtime today.

A check of the box and a boot into the bios setup confirmed that it was mostly as ordered (2* 1024 667 DDR, 100G disk, 2500M, 2.0 Ghz C2D, DVD writer, spare 9 cell battery, 130W psu with european plug) plus the usual dross (modem cable, adapter for the wierd and huge French phone jacks , a bunch of multilingual warranty info).

A further boot and allowing XP to install confirmed that yes, not as ordered, XP SP2 version Français.

But that did let me briefly admire the lovely screen, briefly get annoyed by the balloon help telling me there was a wifi network around (no, really?) every 20 seconds and a look at the system properties to further confirm that the hardware parts were all present and correct. Oh and it seems, Google desktop installed by default. The wifi worked. I assume the bluetooth did too, or at least I got a pretty blue light.

Initial impressions of build quality, sturdiness, hinges and lid locking are favourable. Pictures and more review soon.

Meanwhile I am downloading a ton of drivers and other dell software on another computer. Some of these are huge, I mean 90Mb? And I have a stock XP Pro US English version install CD and associated serial number, courtesy of my corporate IT guys.

OK, now I need to boot it again to see which exact DVD writer it is, Dell has a bunch of them listed for the M90 under optical drives.

I'm kinda tempted to run aquamark and 3Dmark, just to see what the preinstalled system is like, and so I can either feel jubilant or depondent when the reinstalled system is faster (hopefully) or slower.

keyboard

I notice that the M90 keyboard is firmer, more responsive and has less flex and rattle than either of the 8500s (one of which dates to before Dell 'fixed' the wobbly right side problem).

Which is good, as I do appreciate a well made keyboard.