It arrived exactly after three weeks in the lovely compact Dell box. I don’t think there is anything nicer then getting a new gadget and getting to tinker around with it. When I ordered from the person I gave the exact specifications but I didn’t say anything about the color, I assumed it would arrive black, to my surprise it was a dark red and I liked it.
Un-boxed it, pulled out the accessories first, happy to see the spare battery and all the other items. Checked all the CDs which were included, I always have the tendency to want to reinstall myself but Dell does a good job of not installing all the crap software HP & Sony.
I switched on the laptop and did the intial setup, got a clean machine to work with. I transfered all my files from my old laptop to an external hard drive and noted all the programs. First thing I do was install all the Microsoft updates directly from the Microsoft website with some of the optional items.
Program List:
- VLC (video Playback)
- Paint.NET (Free Photo Editing)
- CCCP (Video Codecs)
- Extract Now (Multiple File Extraction)
- Teracopy (FileTransfer)
- FileZilla (FTP)
- Windows Home Server Connector
After initial use the laptop gets about 4 – 5 hours of battery time, after a couple of days of use. Even at the lower power setting I get about 5 hours and 48 minutes which I tried it out while traveling, and even at this setting it is playing back 720p with no issues what so ever, and 1080p plays at 90% with a few hang ups on battery power. Overall the laptop is fantastic, the build quality is great, and I am still putting it through it’s paces.
- 74 Tabs
- 14 Windows
(Click on the image below for a big picture)
<Between all these windows and tabs, Chrome was eating away at the power house of machine. I only built this machine a little over a year and a half ago with the best specifications, and with everything that is running, including an FTP program and a few other programs the machine is running on its last breath every time. I honestly like seeing when its about to crash, its interesting how they built the program to be independent of the other, and every once in a while the Shockwave plug-in crashes, but that doesn’t crash the other tabs. What I find surprising is that Google Chrome uses more Ram then any other browser, it separates the processes so you have many processes taking chunks of ram which add up to a lot, but Firefox takes one huge chunk. Overall I still think that both Chrome and Firefox are excellent browsers, with Chrome being the lighter and faster one.
I am running two servers, a few NAS devices, and a few computer. Each running at 3 hard drives up to 18 hard drives. Between all these machine I have installed a lot of hard drives, and some are running 24/7 months on end and only a restart to refresh the machines but other then that they rarely receive a break from their duties.
My ranking for drives from experience are in this order:
- Western Digital
- Maxtor (Bought out by Seagate)
- Seagate
I have been reluctant to upgrade some of the drives to 1.5TB from Seagate due to technical issues that have been faced by these drives. They have even been bricked from recent firmware upgrades, I tried one 1.5TB drive and it kept locking up in the Windows Home Server, I unloaded it and tried it on another machine and I still faced problems with it, I returned to Hawalli for a refund and took the WD 1TB Green Drive, which works perfectly. I have had a few failures on the machines and the majority have been the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives, luckily I keep the receipts and take them back to the Hawalli store and ask for an exchange for another brand. So after the last couple of years I am sticking to Western Digital drives when ever possible. Its not that drives don’t fail, they will eventually fail but the rate at which they fail is important. It seems Seagate’s track record isn’t looking too good for sometime now.
After long deliberation between the Lenovo and the Dell, I pretty much went with the Dell. After looking at the XPS and the Latitude, I decided to go with the Dell Latitude and the specs below. I placed the order around the 2nd week of March and I’m expecting it sometime over the next couple of days. I’m hoping soon, the best part is that it comes with a clean install and no crappy software like HP or Sony install on their machines, you can even ask for it without Antivirus or Productivity software. I will install AVG or NOD32, and Microsoft 2007 later and all the other list of softwares that I install when I’m making a clean install, I especially like the case of the machine.
Specifications
- Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9550 (2.66GHz, 6M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
- Windows Vista® Business 64-BIT SP1
- 15.4†UltraSharpâ„¢ Wide WXGA+ (1440×900) LED Display-Regal Red
- NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M
- 4.0GB, DDR2-800 SDRAM, 1 DIMMS
- 128GB Dell Mobility Solid State Drive
- 8X DVD+/-RW w/Roxio and Cyberlink Power DVDâ„¢, Red
- 9 Cell Battery
- 90W A/C Adapter (3-pin)
- Additional 9 Cell Battery
- Intel® WiFi Link 5300 802.11a/g/n Draft Mini Card
- Dell Wireless® 370 Bluetooth Module
- Integrated Webcam with digital microphone
- PCMCIA & ExpressCard
Link: Dell
A lot of people have been in the situation where they have lost their music library one way or another, but thankfully they have it all on their iPods. Now the issue is getting it back to the PC and acting all normal again, so how exactly do you go about it without erasing the damn thing. Another situation is when you want to just duplicate your friend’s iPod, some people just aren’t good at making decent playlists when they have thousands of songs. I know I forget a few songs, and making playlists gets annoying with that many songs, but worth it in the long wrong. So are are a few useful software that you can use “expand” the usage of your iPod.
Disk Aid (Freeware)
This is a really useful software, some people have the very large 80 – 160 GB iPods which they haven’t completely filled. Disk Aid turns your iPod into an external hard drive that you are able to drop items into without having any affect on your current files, unless you delete something. Works really well and its free.
Tune Aid ($25)
This one of the first applications which I think is a must for anyone with an iPod and its worth the $25. You can copy your whole iPod to your iTunes including Playlists, Album Art, Number of times played, and all the other details. You can keep adding your iTunes library by doing this to multiple iPods and copying it to your PC. Also it doesn’t matter if the iPod was Mac or PC formated, Tune Aid can read it. Also you can be specific about certain songs or videos, and you can leave out the rest. Its an amazing piece of software which is worth the $25, it works with all types of iPods. It is also able to recover songs from a corrupted database/iPod.
iPod 2 iPod ($39)
Copying between two iPods is a hassle, especially playlists and all the other items. Specifically if you don’t want to copy the items to your iTunes library. The usually problem anyone faces is that iTunes will format an iPod which isn’t connected to it previously, so you have to make sure you set it so that you Manage the Library and switch off Auto Sync. You can plug both iPods to the PC and it will recognize it, the best part about the software is that its very simple to use. You select the tracks you can to copy and copy it over to the other iPod, and you can do that with the Playlists as well. The freeware version can only do 100 songs, but the main one can do many, I tested it already with about 7000+ songs. Its an extremely useful software if you do this a lot, I do this because I take friend’s iPods and copy them back and forth, but is it worth $40 I don’t think so, I think its worth about $15 max. But it is a very clean piece of software that doesn’t involve any complications.
I have my Dell Latitude since 2005 and it has been a fantastic laptop. 15.4 inch screen, good quality build, clean and simple design, doesn’t show how much it has been used or abused, a bit on the heavy side but not bad.
The laptop has lasted a solid 4 years with me but recently the power plug area has been a bit iffy. I have to pull or push the wire in a certain direction to get it to charge, and the problem is the plug is connected to the motherboard. I checked with Dell in Kuwait and they said they have to replace the motherboard and it could cost somewhere between 170 KD to 250 KD since it was out of warranty, I was shocked. No motherboard for desktops come close to it except the very high end ones but this isn’t a high end desktop its a normal business laptop.
So at this point I’m looking for another laptop and checking out my options. I’m thinking about getting another Dell Latitude, because I like the clean cut design, and business laptops are much better built then consumer laptops and they are decently priced.
Main Purpose of this laptop:
- Multi-Tasking
- Photo Editing
- Watching HD Shows/Movies
- Work Tasks
Requirements:
- Bright screen
- Long Battery Life (3.5+ Hours at least)
- SSD
- PC Card/Express
Thats about it for now, but I’m also looking at the XPS line of laptop. Still I’m leaning towards the Dell Latitude. I don’t like any Lenovo laptops, I keep thinking it was designed in the Soviet era. I don’t like HP laptops either, tried them and didn’t like them, I feel they are lacking in power.
The iPod Touch is an amazing product, with all the different applications available it seriously very useful. The one problem I’m facing now is that the 32 GB is not enough if you plan on putting videos on your iPod Touch. The one thing I do enjoy is watching music videos, there are so many good music videos to download and watch, it gives the music a different flavor and recently that has been filling up my iPod, so a larger one is needed. Can’t they make a 64 GB iPod touch and keep it as thin as it is, i just love its size.
I’m always on the look out for major news from Windows since they have some improvements on the way. I’m planning to install Windows 7 on one of my machines, but I have honestly been to lazy to work on it but I know I will over the next couple of weeks. Also I have been using Vista for some time and I have to say that its pretty good and a lot of the improvements have been great in comparison to when it was first released.
- Windows 7 will be release in September
- Vista SP2 Patch will be released soon (I’m hoping very soon)
- A slim version of Windows 7 will be made for Netbooks, going to be interesting how good its going to be since preliminary reports say that the normal Windows 7 works great with the current line of Netbooks.
I have shifted my iTunes Library from the crappy PC to the CORE PC (iCore7 Processor), its been running perfectly dual screen and pushing all its processing power to the edge. Since shifting the library to this new PC its been going smoothly, I have synced all the videos and music to my iPod Classic and Nano 4G, when you sync it all the previous data gets erased so you have a fresh install.
Now the issue I am facing with the iPod Touch is the applications. I haven’t really figured out how to shift all the applications to the new computer, the free ones are simple enough but what about the applications that I have paid for, how do I go about shifting them?
I like the available widgets available from Yahoo Widgets, so I run a few widgets on my machine. A machine running Windows XP Pro, 2 GB, Quad Core Processor, and a good amount of space. This is the machine that I mainly use, opening about 3-4 windows with 20 – 30 tabs each, running my ftp program, extracting files, and all the other multi-tasking that I do. I usually keep it on for weeks, but I noticed that recently my computer gets heavy after some time. I restarted the machine, defragmented all the hard drives, cleaned out the cache assuming that things will be running smoothly, a week later it got really slow for no reason. I checked out the running processes and Yahoo Widgets was hogging about 25% of the Ram which caused the huge slowdown, once I killed the application/process it was running smoothly. I do get annoyed that it hogs so much memory after running for a while, but I still use it and restart it more often, I think they should find a solution for that. (Click picture for a larger version)