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Planky

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About Planky

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  1. Planky

    Just ordered a new laptop from Dell to replace my Acer Aspire and desktop PC. I'll hopefully have it in a week or two.

    Specs as follows:

    Core Duo 7100
    2GB DDR2 RAM
    NVIDIA GeForce Go 8400M GS
    250GB SATA HDD
    Slotloading DVD Writer
    Usual Wireless/Ethernet networking
    Usual Bundled shitware with Vista

    I also ordered the 9 cell battery, rather than the 6 cell to give me more travel time (my acer battery only lasts 40 minutes). I had the option to switch to a 64GB solidstate drive, but the cost was well over my budget, despite the benefits of having a non mechanical drive.

    The reviews I've read have all been rather positive, most expressing surprise over the performance of an ultra portable laptop. The Toshiba R100's we have at work are complete rubbish compared to this puppy.

    I'm going to remove Vista and install XP when I get it. I did find out after I ordered that there are no XP drivers for the Nvidia chip, only Vista drivers. Apparently Nvidia don't add the necessary entries to their INF file for their mobile gfx chips - effectively forcing you to use the vendors drivers (which are rarely updated and in this case don't work with XP), so I have to load in a thirdparty inf file. A slight annoyance, but it does answer the question why I couldn't switch to XP like their other offerings.

    1. Show previous comments  15 more
    2. GGG

      GGG

      Use3D said:

      You've been misinformed.

      Mine's 5+ years old and I haven't yet had to invest any money in it. I had to fix a bsod once but it wasn't a hardware problem.

    3. Planky

      Planky

      I just learnt not to press the mediadirect button (launches dvd/video program without going into windows). The damn thing overwirtes boot.ini, but if it fails to install, it doesn't change it back. I had to use a live linux cd to fix it (I was suprised the fixmbr/fixboot tools didn't fix it).

      Why doesn't the WinXP recovery console have a text editor?

    4. Planky

      Planky

      This little bastard is going back to Dell. It's running on it's third motherboard now, new hdd and new palmrest/trackpad. Sodding Vista installed an update (despite windows update being disabled) and it bluescreens while booting up. Normally I've been able to use system restore to fix it, but this time it won't work (just says access denied when attempting to restore).

      Dell is trying to get me to pay a 20% restocking fee (equates to approx $400) plus 170 for sending it back - so I'm throwing NZ's Consumer Guarantee Act at them which basically says they have to give me a full refund. Way to treat your customers dell.

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