Well, my Dell Inspiron 6400 arrived today. It looks pretty good. I’ve used it for a grand total of about 5 minutes, and it seems pretty sweet. The specs:
Intel Core Duo T2500 at 2GHz
2GB 667MHz DDR2-SDRAM
100GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Disk (formatted to 87GB, but with 11GB of preloaded crap ! )
15.4″ UltraSharp LCD at 1680×1050
ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 graphics accelerator
Microsoft Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2

Things I’m so far happy about:
- The screen is good, it’s glossy but it’s good. Very high-res…
- REINSTALL DISCS! I had heard various reports about whether Dell give out install CDs. I thought I would have to call Dell and explain I want to reinstall from scratch, but there in the box with my machine was a DVD of XP Media Centre (with what looks like a few minor Dell additions slipstreamed into it, I’ll analyse it in detail later), and CDs with drivers and software. Score.
- The keyboard is pretty good
- TV-Out works like a charm
- Not as heavy as I thought, it’s lighter than the 400MHz Toshiba that’s sitting on my floor..
- 2GB of RAM … that will definitely come in handy.
- You hit Fn+F10 and the CD ejects. Yay, no more having to actually go down and press the button / go into Explorer and right-click and go Eject.
- Comes pre-set at 120dpi, so everything looks like it’s set on big fonts. I like this because if everything was the normal size, everything would be inconceivably tiny!
- Oh yes, did I mention it’s shiny?

Things I don’t like about it so far:
- Touch-pad. Maybe I just need to get used to it, but it seems a bit annoying. I’m more used to those TrackPoint little red/green stick thingies wedged between the G, H and B keys…
- Pre-loaded crap. I have heard a lot about what is pre-installed onto Dells, ranging from bad to worse (I read some reports of MyWay spyware being preloaded, this is now not the case). If this wasn’t the exam period, I would probably be half-way reformatting by now.
- Windows Messenger is there but MSN Messenger is not. Aww, come-on Dell, you need MSN Messenger! I guess I’ll use Windows Messenger for now …
- 450MB of RAM is used on startup because of the preloaded stuff.

Regardless of those little glitches, it seems like it’s going to serve me well. Now I’ve got a nice notebook, which I just need to reformat until it’s an excellent machine. Now my friends can forever label me as a “dell n00b”, even though I have the upper hand, and the better computer. Mwahahaha!

In Other News: Microsoft Office System 2007 Beta 2 was released. I’m downloading it now, you can register to get it from the Microsoft website. You tell them a bit about yourself and they give you the download links and a product key. The screenies look freaking sweet.

Also I’m busy preparing for exams so I haven’t been on the internet too much recently.

–Ben

BTW: Pics of my new porta-beast are coming soon… and also a special announcement in the next week or two. Watch this damn space!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Computing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.