[2kmaro note: submitted by yazdzik  - System ate his name!]
Price - 1892.75
Dothan 2.13, ati x600, dvdrw, 60g at 7200 rpm, wuxga, 1024, dell wireless 1450(broadcom chip)
Ordered from refurbished, new machine from cancelled contract.
Observations:
Arrived on date promised, everything ok.
Windows preloaded, worked.
Carrying case barely fits $2k laptop, so is of little value, orth what I paid, to wit nothing.
One call to dell tech support was answered in less than two minutes, the information about a fairly complex partioning issue was answered in less than five minutes, with absolute accuracy.(I slid a partition and needed to fix the hal.dll error)
The case is not Sager(Clevo) or IBM quality, and the keyboard appears to be far flimsier than the Sager I own, on the other hand, the cover near the screen seems to be very rigid and protective.
No dead pixels at all!
For most video apps, ati x600 is more than adequate, for hard core gamers, this box does not enter into consideration.
This is my first centrino box, and, in all honesty, while I am amazed at the ability to work uncabled for almost three and a half hours, there is an apparent penalty is speed of rendering, although until I can run tests, this is just a guess. On the other hand, during non graphic-intensive uses, the response is in every way immediate.
Dreadfully cheap "feel" is offset by genuinely cheap price. Note that for $169 complete care is added to the three year warranty, whereas the same protection is not offered by sager at all, and by the reseller pctorque but at $370.
(the sager 3880 at same exact spec, including three year adp, would be $2309, without windows, which is the big advantage to buying from pctorque, $2184,. Naturally, one has to provide one's own credit. The price above for the dell includes 3 year adp as well.)
My first experience after three weeks with a "major"?
All things being equal, and had Sager the facilities to provide the credit, I would go with the Sager 3880, since my 5680 was so superb.
However, all things are not equal, and given Dell's marketing clout, ten percent or more savings in a business purchase is a massive amount of money, and for a home buyer, I suspect the same only moreso.
As to running linux, the choice of parts being broadcom and conexant is unfortunate, although we all know the workarounds.
The question remains as to whether the flimsiness is real or apparent - I'll update this is six months. My laptop lives in the back of a cabrio, on planes, in recording studios, going from NYC 100% humidity and 98^ F to freezing NYC offices- in short, if I were a laptop owned by me, I would ask for protection from family services. We shall see if the vaunted Dell latitude reliability is for real.
In the meantime, I can say that what is supposed to work works well, the services have been all they were hyped to be ----the price, less than $2k for a laptop with the specifiation noted including three years adp on site service, unbeatable.
Not a bad start.
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by 2kmaro
last modified: 2005-08-15 14:14:40 |
