New i8600 -- First impressions

Just got this thing on Tuesday as a replacement for an Alienware 51. To start with, it's certainly not the powerhouse that the Alienware is, but then, I didn't expect that it would be.

Basic Specs:
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 755(2GHz/400MHz FSB) 15.4 WUXGA,
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional
521MB of RAM (just ordered 512 more a minute ago)
Video Card: 128MB DDR ATI's MOBILITY® RADEON™ 9600 PROTURBO
Hard Drive: 60GB Hard Drive at 7200RPM
Dell® Wireless 1450 Internal Wireless (802.11a/b/g, 54Mbps)

This is not an in depth review. It's just first impressions.

The Bad:
Nothing new to say here. Same complaints that others have posted, none of which were enough to put me off buying the thing:
Right side of hand rest gets quite warm
Too few USB ports
Way, WAY too much additional, and unneeded, software on the thing (Add/remove programs took care of that.)
MacAfee stuff is intrusive and hard to remove (Not exactly Dell's fault, but then, they shouldn't have put it on there in the first place.)
The Dell software to control the wireless card didn’t allow me to connect to my network (had to use the Windows provided software). YMMV
Dell still uses overseas tech support. (Again, no surprise there, but after my Alienware experience…)

The Good:
No dead Pixels
Fast delivery (even taking into account their bloated wait times).
WiFi card has great reception
The keyboard (I know people complain, but I *like* it!)
Slick machine.


The ridiculous:
I wanted to turn off the touch pad the same way I did with my i8000 -- meaning in the BIOS. The BIOS did, indeed, have the same settings that the i8000 had. If you have a PS/2 mouse plugged in, it’ll deactivate the touch pad when it’s plugged in. Problem is, THERE IS NO PS/2 PORT! I was LMAO! I could, and most likely will, turn off the touchpad permanently in the BIOS.


First thing I did, after cleaning off most of the crap Dell had put on it, was to install Doom 3. Well, I tried to. Then I discovered that good ol’ Macafee was blocking the installation. Well, they don’t tell you to turn off virus protection for nothing! Anyway, the Alienware machine plays Doom3 flawlessly (no surprise there). The Dell, sort of choked a little. Interestingly enough, one of the first things I noticed was that on the Alienware, the game only played in a ‘square screen’ mode (I’m sure there’s name for that)

The Dell, OTOH, played in full widescreen mode. I had the video settings set up identically in both machines. Both have 128 MB video cards (ATI for Dell, nVidea for Alienware). On the Dell, the game stuttered in high resolution mode, but eventually seemed to smooth out. I say seemed, because I didn’t play for all that long. I’m hoping that the addition of another 512MB of ram will help that (yes, I know that the GPU matters the most, but extra ram can’t hurt). I don’t know if the stutter is caused by the stepping up of the CPU or what. Maybe someone else knows. When I tried the game in medium resolution, it ran very nicely and didn’t look too bad at all. Still, I should be able to run it in high resolution mode. After all, my desktop is only an Athelon AXP2000 with an nVidea 128 card (and 512 of ram) and it has no problems. Well see. At the time, I think that MacAfee was still on there, so who knows.

In case anyone was interested, I did install a firewall and virus protection. Both free. I used Kiero Firewall and Avast virus scan. Also, I removed WordPerfect from the machine and replaced it with OpenOffice, which is a *really* awesome piece of software. Eventually, I’ll be putting Linux on this machine. I’ll also be applying the Black Viper services setup.

So that’s it. Now, I have some questions for you:

When I used partition Magic 8 to set up the Linux partition, I noticed that there was 3Gb of seemingly unused space at the end of the drive (unused, not unformatted). Is that being used for some kind of ‘live’ backup? If so, I need to turn that off and delete it.

Also, I noticed a *huge* hibernation file on the hard-drive. If I only use standby mode, do I need the hibernate file?

Thanks, and I hope you found this at least a little interesting. Anyone want to buy an Alienware 51 laptop ?

Thanks. I'll do that when I get home. Actually, I seem to remember removing all the hibernation settings the other night. Hmmm. I'll have to check.

You're corretions were correct: It is the left side.

The reason that the software bloat is a problem, is because I didn't feel like hope that I had all the correct drivers and such before running some tests on the machine. I have 21 days to prove that this machine can take the place of the Alienware laptop, and I didn't want to take any chances. Besides, it'll get rebuld eventually...

I think that the reason for the choke is the speedstepping. I'm not sure, but I'm tempted to download SpeedswitchXP and see if that helps. The odd thing is that sometimes the games play smooth as silk, and others, they seriously gack.

Following up on the choking problem....

It seems like the problem *is* the speedstep software. I don't know this for absolute certainty, since I installed 1 gig of ram at the same time I installed SpeedswitchXP. But when I set Speedswitch to make the computer, while on AC, run at the highest speed, both UT2004 (running at high or higher in most of the settings) and Doom3 (running at high and 1024x768) ran without a hitch.

So, at this point, I declare that (for now ) I love the new dell and my Alienware 51m is now for sale.