New lapdog
The new laptop arrived on Tuesday. Life events (sick dog) rather took the shine off the new-toy-lust, but that’s OK.
To recap, this is a Dell XPS M1530, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, GF8600MGT video. Essentially a 15″ desktop-replacement type system, about as grunty a GPU as you’re going to get in a laptop without paying crazy money for an Alienware machine.
So far so good. It’s running Vista Ultimate (I’d have been happy with Home Premium, but I opted for the red one, and that comes with Ultimate) with the VMware Server beta handling a Ubuntu VM for work-stuff.
Overall it’s been nice and stable, performing about as expected. I’m a bit leery of running it with the lid closed — it’s hooked up to a 19″ LCD most of the time — as it gets a bit toasty, but having reorganised the computer room a bit it isn’t really a problem to leave it open at the back of the desk.
Also rather enjoying the new version of Opera. This plus Privoxy has become my “default” web browsing environment, with Firefox and IE available where necessary. An Opera addon to load the current page in IE or Firefox — rather like the equivalent for Firefox — would be nice, though.
Despite concern that working with this as a mobile machine wouldn’t really be viable with my crappy vision, it’s been OK so far. I’ve got fonts turned up a bit in Vista, and typically run PuTTY, eReader, and Opera with monster fonts as well. Since that covers most of my non-gaming use it’s been OK.
Overall, pretty happy with the purchase. It’s no Macbook Pro, style-wise, and the disk is a little loud, but it does appear to Just Work and it’s not what I’d call bad looking.
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