Computer Specs:
Price Paid:
$1337.00
Free CDRW/DVD Drive Promo
Free Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 WLAN Promo
$350.00 off list price web Promo
Free Shipping Promo
Purchased from Dell Website on February 2, 2005
Currently under UPS tracking, Arriving Feb 21st, 2005
Acessories Purchased:
1GB DDR2 533mhz RAM from Kingston $230.00 Free Shipping
Objective for Purchasing Laptop:
Portable design station for use of Macromedia Director MX2004, Flash MX2004, Dreamweaver MX2004, Fireworks MX2004, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Rhino 3D Modelling, Blender 3D Modelling. Light 3D rendering on the go when necessary. Light gaming when bored and on the run. Standard use of productivity (Internet, Word Processing, Email, etc.) Large Scene rendering, massive animation rendering, and hard core gameing is left for the desktop at home.
Criteria for Purchase:
Small form factor for ease of portability 14.1" Screen Max, 12.1" Screen Min
Dedicated Video Graphics Processor, Min 64MB Memory
Less than 5.5Lbs
Less than 12.5"x10.5"x1.5"
Atleast a 3 hour battery life
Price budget of $1500
Review
I recieved the laptop today, 11:03am Monday 21st, 2005. 3 Days before it orginal date of arrival, I was very impressed. I opened it up, battery was already fully charged, plugged in the AC, saw a green light and turned the bad boy on. The Windows sign on was quick and responsive. I am impressed. I quickly took the keyboard out (which was very, very easy) and installed the Kingston 1GB DDR2 533mhz Ram card. Now we are really cooking.
I took the laptop to my university. I became thoroughly impressed that it was able to get a very strong wireless signal in a classroom that normally gives other students problems(specifically the Mac G4 Notebook students...Im not Mac bashing, I love Macs.) Let me also add that this thing is very light, there was no discomfort in carrying it around.
Screen: The screen is excellent, very crisp, and no dead pixels. It is not the shiny type of screen, which made me very excited, since those reflective screens hurt my eyes when there are bright lights behind me. Ill come back to this part and do an angle test.
Battery Test: I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox,downloaded and installed all the windows updates, downloaded and installed an FTP program, and installed Microsoft Office. I also downloaded the 180 MB 3Dmark 2003 program. During this time, I was modifiying my website and taking notes in a class on the lappie. Folks this thing was doing all this on the battery, and lasted 3hrs and 15 minutes. I was ecstatic. When it cutoff it saved my data, and when I plugged the outlet in it and turned it back on...it was exactly where I had left off.
This is where it gets nasty. After 6 hours of constant use at school, I was ready to take it home, install my multimedia software, run some gaussian blur time tests, rendering time tests, modelling test, game tests, and the benchmark tests. I bring it home, set it up, and press the power button. Nothing happens. I attach the AC and press the power button, again nothing happens. I reseat the memory, the hard-drive, the wireless card, the optical drive...nothing. I check the dell support website and do a system reset. Nothing the laptop just does not come on. It completely died on me after 6 hours of use.
I call Dell support and get a friendly Indian man in 17 minutes, and then he tells me that somehow the Dell support system sent me to the Inspiron support, so he graciously connects me directly to a Lattitude line person. This guy was very friendly, he pretty much asked me to do what I had already done..so I did it again. And once again, no power.He apologizes for my inconvinience and tells me that I have two options: return the system for a refund or send it to get a new motherboard installed. So I decide to go with sending it to get a new motherboard installed...and so the review ends here until I get my lappie again. I am very depressed.
Pictures
<Updated on Monday Feb 21st, upon arrival of laptop>
Bonus
The V3100 ATI Fire GL and the ATI X300 are one and the same. The Fire GL utilizes a different driver set optimized only for OpenGL graphics. As my 3d software (Rhino & Blender) use Direct X just fine, it gives me the option to later upgrade to Maya or 3D studio and install the Open GL ATI Fire GL driver set. This is a 2 Geometry Engine, 4 Pixel Pipeline VPU, with 200^6 vertices per second, and 1.6^9 Pixels per second. This is packaged in a 128bit interface with a 6.4GB/sec bandwidth. This is more than enough for modelling, and light scene rendering, painful if you are rendering a full fledged animation.You save a couple hundred dollars with this setup then purchasing a Dell Precision M20. The FireGL driver can be manually downloaded from the Dell Support Website.
Following are Technical Images from the manual that tell you the placement of all the parts of the computer. This stuff is Copyright Dell
- Intel® Pentium® M Processor 750 (1.86GHz)
- 14.1 SXGA+, RADEON X300
- 60GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 5400RPM
- 24X CDRW/DVD Combo
- Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200 WLAN
- 256MB DDR2 400MHz SDRAM, 1 DIMM
Price Paid:
$1337.00
Free CDRW/DVD Drive Promo
Free Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 WLAN Promo
$350.00 off list price web Promo
Free Shipping Promo
Purchased from Dell Website on February 2, 2005
Currently under UPS tracking, Arriving Feb 21st, 2005
Acessories Purchased:
1GB DDR2 533mhz RAM from Kingston $230.00 Free Shipping
Objective for Purchasing Laptop:
Portable design station for use of Macromedia Director MX2004, Flash MX2004, Dreamweaver MX2004, Fireworks MX2004, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Rhino 3D Modelling, Blender 3D Modelling. Light 3D rendering on the go when necessary. Light gaming when bored and on the run. Standard use of productivity (Internet, Word Processing, Email, etc.) Large Scene rendering, massive animation rendering, and hard core gameing is left for the desktop at home.
Criteria for Purchase:
Small form factor for ease of portability 14.1" Screen Max, 12.1" Screen Min
Dedicated Video Graphics Processor, Min 64MB Memory
Less than 5.5Lbs
Less than 12.5"x10.5"x1.5"
Atleast a 3 hour battery life
Price budget of $1500
Review
I recieved the laptop today, 11:03am Monday 21st, 2005. 3 Days before it orginal date of arrival, I was very impressed. I opened it up, battery was already fully charged, plugged in the AC, saw a green light and turned the bad boy on. The Windows sign on was quick and responsive. I am impressed. I quickly took the keyboard out (which was very, very easy) and installed the Kingston 1GB DDR2 533mhz Ram card. Now we are really cooking.
I took the laptop to my university. I became thoroughly impressed that it was able to get a very strong wireless signal in a classroom that normally gives other students problems(specifically the Mac G4 Notebook students...Im not Mac bashing, I love Macs.) Let me also add that this thing is very light, there was no discomfort in carrying it around.
Screen: The screen is excellent, very crisp, and no dead pixels. It is not the shiny type of screen, which made me very excited, since those reflective screens hurt my eyes when there are bright lights behind me. Ill come back to this part and do an angle test.
Battery Test: I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox,downloaded and installed all the windows updates, downloaded and installed an FTP program, and installed Microsoft Office. I also downloaded the 180 MB 3Dmark 2003 program. During this time, I was modifiying my website and taking notes in a class on the lappie. Folks this thing was doing all this on the battery, and lasted 3hrs and 15 minutes. I was ecstatic. When it cutoff it saved my data, and when I plugged the outlet in it and turned it back on...it was exactly where I had left off.
This is where it gets nasty. After 6 hours of constant use at school, I was ready to take it home, install my multimedia software, run some gaussian blur time tests, rendering time tests, modelling test, game tests, and the benchmark tests. I bring it home, set it up, and press the power button. Nothing happens. I attach the AC and press the power button, again nothing happens. I reseat the memory, the hard-drive, the wireless card, the optical drive...nothing. I check the dell support website and do a system reset. Nothing the laptop just does not come on. It completely died on me after 6 hours of use.
I call Dell support and get a friendly Indian man in 17 minutes, and then he tells me that somehow the Dell support system sent me to the Inspiron support, so he graciously connects me directly to a Lattitude line person. This guy was very friendly, he pretty much asked me to do what I had already done..so I did it again. And once again, no power.He apologizes for my inconvinience and tells me that I have two options: return the system for a refund or send it to get a new motherboard installed. So I decide to go with sending it to get a new motherboard installed...and so the review ends here until I get my lappie again. I am very depressed.
Pictures
<Updated on Monday Feb 21st, upon arrival of laptop>
Bonus
The V3100 ATI Fire GL and the ATI X300 are one and the same. The Fire GL utilizes a different driver set optimized only for OpenGL graphics. As my 3d software (Rhino & Blender) use Direct X just fine, it gives me the option to later upgrade to Maya or 3D studio and install the Open GL ATI Fire GL driver set. This is a 2 Geometry Engine, 4 Pixel Pipeline VPU, with 200^6 vertices per second, and 1.6^9 Pixels per second. This is packaged in a 128bit interface with a 6.4GB/sec bandwidth. This is more than enough for modelling, and light scene rendering, painful if you are rendering a full fledged animation.You save a couple hundred dollars with this setup then purchasing a Dell Precision M20. The FireGL driver can be manually downloaded from the Dell Support Website.
Following are Technical Images from the manual that tell you the placement of all the parts of the computer. This stuff is Copyright Dell
