Monday, April 03, 2006

Happy laptop days! For a long time I ve been planning to swap my two desktops (office, home) for a high end laptop I could develop on. I have the same desktop in the two locations: a 3 year old Dell Dimension with a 3.3Ghz P4. It was an ok machine, but never quick enough and I really wanted the flexibility of a laptop. So I finally decided on the Dell Inspiron 9400. I ve had it a few days now and I am very impressed. I speced it to the max with a 17 inch UltraSharp TrueLife WUXGA wide screen display, 2.16Ghz Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 100GB/7200rpm drive, 802.11g, ATI Radeon 256MB graphics, bluetooth + wireless mouse! The LCD at 1920x1200 with 96dpi is crystal clear. The difference from my 21 inch CRT is incredible. I am really happy with the performance. It rocks, IO in general, and compilation in particular is 6 or 7 times faster than my desktop. Its just excellent - Eclipse starts in about 5 seconds, compared to 30 seconds on my desktop ... ripper! I have often heard people say that traditionally Dell don’t have a reputation at the high end, that you buy Dell for middle of the road stuff. That has not really been my experience and the 9400 compares very favorably with equivalent Sony and Toshibas, way better value for money in fact. I guess I will have to see how it wears, lugging it between home and office every day on my back (on my bike), lets see how it holds up over the next 12 months. I will be taking a lot of care with it, its not going to get knocked around, I bought a Targus 17 inch XL Notebook Backpack. My only concern is whether I will get it into an aircraft cabin. May have to do a Tardus with my Targus :-) 12:10:52 PM    comment []

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