A month of Dell

It’s been just over a month now since I got my Dell XPS M1530 so it’s probably about time I wrote something about it.

For the people who can’t be fucked reading this whole thing, the M1530 is a good unit. The battery life is excellent, Vista works perfectly on it (well perfect as far as Vista goes) and performance is great. There are however a few small things that I dislike.

Media Direct
This is something that looks good on paper and actually helped sell the laptop to me. The idea is that from rest (shutdown or hibernation) you can boot up into a stripped down version of windows and play audio and video. In practise this turned out to be unnecessary and annoying.

First of all I should tell you that the only way to install Media Direct is to wipe the hard drive. If you install Vista before Media Direct, you’re screwed and have to start over. Second is that if you mess with the partitions it breaks. It will get as far as loading then blue screen with some “plug and play” error. And to top it all off, the only way to repair the MD software is to re-install, thus wiping out your drive.

I did have a poke around inside MD after it had broken for about the fifth time, it turns out its just XP embedded (stripped down XP). Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I can reinstall and repair XP without wiping out the drive, then why can’t I do it with Media Direct? It seems to me that Dell has deliberately cut down the installation process to be faster and easier (and cheaper) but left anyone who needs to add any partitions out to dry.

SD Card and ExpressCard
These things are trivial for me, as I don’t own and ExpressCards or use SD cards often however it is still annoying. The problem is that Dell seem to have made both these slots about 1mm - 2mm shorter than standard cards. This means that everything except the blanks that come with the laptop will pop out if you, for example, put the laptop in a bag. This only affected me when I noticed that the small remote that comes with the laptop (another cool thing) kept falling out when ever I put my laptop in my bag (which is a lot of the time at Uni).

Odd Wireless Drivers
This is only a problem some of the time for me. Intel is well known for its Linux support and has made most of its drivers free for download. However, there seems to be an issue with the Linux drivers for the chip in this laptop. Looking through both the Fedora and Ubuntu repositories, I has installed the driver but it didn’t work. Eventually it decided to agree with me, but only when I used another piece of software to utilise some XP drivers under Linux. Not really a problem but an annoyance.

Anyway, there are more good things about this laptop than there are bad. As I mentioned before, the battery life is excellent, I have had it running for 4 hours and it still wasn’t dead, one day I will test it out to see how far I can push it. Another is that the Video card is excellent for a mobile unit. While it can get hot (it’s either that or the wireless card) it delivers great performance, to the point where I can push the settings higher than my desktop. It does have limited memory, but this is a non-issue with most games.

The included accessories are also notable. The laptop came with a case, the aforementioned remote that fits into the ExpressCard slot, a cleaning cloth (good thing too, this thing attracts fingerprints) and a set of pretty good sealed ear buds (actually I got 2 pairs :P ). So while Dell may have skimped on the build a little, they make up for it :)

As I said, on the whole I love it, it fore fills all my needs as both a student and a gamer and would probably fit most people nicely. What I should say is that I got essentially the base unit (save for the screen which I upped to 1440×900) so it can only get faster from this.

If I actually had something to compare it too I might have given it a rating, but I guess that’ll have to wait for the next laptop :)